Gr 6 UpThe world of 1950's professional wrestling altered though an artistic participant's eye. This affectionate, animated memoir of a struggling art student's unusual part-time job is part autobiography, part family scrapbook, and part portfolio, forming a surprisingly disarming whole. (July 1993)
"In the summer of 1952, at age seventeen, I became a professional wrestler." What better way to begin this warm backward glance by a well-known children's book author-illustrator? With wry humor, directness, and much colorful, enticing detail, Lewin recalls his boyhood fascination with wrestling, an affection shared by his family (his two brothers also became wrestlers), and he salutes the wrestlers he came to know and admire. With Lewin as guide, we go ringside and backstage again and again. The book is filled with photographs--candid family shots, including ones of the author in the ring as well as many pictures of the men Lewin fought, laughed with, accompanied on road trips, and even used as models for his sensitive artwork. A great lure for browsers is the self-portrait of Lewin, towel around shoulders, that adorns the jacket front, and there is more of Lewin's artwork inside--simple portrait sketches and full-color paintings of wrestlers decked out in all manner of showy gear--that captures the violence of the sport but also the vulnerability, the pride, and the flamboyance of the men involved in it. As in any "family album," some of the photos are blurry, and just how Lewin, a graduate of Pratt, managed the transition from wrestling and illustrating the pulps to artwork for children's books remains a tantalizing mystery. This is not a book for today's crop of young World Wrestling Federation fans, whose enthusiasm peaks around age 10; but it is a captivating memoir all the same. It shows the human side of a sport routinely associated with glitz and gore, and Lewin's pleasure in his own recollections is wonderfully contagious. That he cherishes his memories of wrestling as much as he loves his art is very clear.
