Oh god he's at it again, I'm sure the groans are going out around the world of Ciao right now, but yep - as I sit here watching Wrestlemania 22 I bring myself to think of how a book can inspire you to do better, or how it can inspire you to overcome bad times in your life.
A quick introduction to who Lita actually is, needless to say as its a wrestling autobiography that this review is about, Lita (real name Amy Dumas) is a member of the WWE (formerly WWF until legal proceedings by the World Wildlife Fund). Basically this means that she is a female wrestler or as WWE would prefer you to see it - she's a 'WWE Diva' which means that when they do the photo-shoots with women stripping down to bikini's in various locations around the world - more often than not there'll be pictures of Lita involved.
Now on reading that previous paragraph you'd be forgiven for thinking of Lita as little more than the American equivalent of the UK's Page 3 girls, even more so when I mention that before wrestling she worked as a stripper, but she's more than that - she's a lady that defined women's wrestling today, made it possible for them to actually show wrestling moves, and she gave a lot of female fans an open door to admitting to liking wrestling.
As with all but 3 of the WWE's in-house produced autobiographies, the book wasn't actually 'wrote' by Lita, more-in it was actually wrote by a ghost-writer, this time by Michael Krugman - the same man who wrote the Hardy Boyz autobiography 'Exist 2 Inspire' - this decision was probably taken after discussion with both of the Hardy brothers, and more-so as Krugman had done a good job on his previous wrestling offerings as well.
But enough about the author and subjects pedigree, onto the actual book itself, as with almost all other wrestling autobiographies, it starts off focussing on Lita's up-bringing and child-hood, telling the tale of how she moved around a bit, but at a young age found a liking for 2 things - caring for animals and punk rock music. However to keep your hardcore wrestling fan interested the book doesn't settle on this too long - actually less than 100 pages go by before we start to get into the wrestling side of things, but I feel that there is actually a lot of interesting stories told in that first 100 pages.
Firstly there's tales of travelling Europe in the back of a band's camper van following them on tour through Germany and other European countries, then there's the tales from when she was working for animal shelters surviving on a shoe-string budget onto finding a better paying living as a stripper but that including its own bad-sides as well including a tale of one of the local drug dealers who found out all her personal details just from knowing her fake stripper name.
I suppose the background tale is just to try and give you a feeling of how hard the up-bringing of Lita was and to perhaps inspire you into pushing for your own goals, and to a point it did, but the main inspiration is to come from the wrestling training and progression story to come.
Once we get into the introduction to wrestling start of things, we get to the crux of how Lita became the WWE Superstar that is known worldwide starting in a trip to Mexico to see the Lucha Libre style wrestling that is prevalent there. It talks of how Lita didn't know where to go to start her training or even to watch a local show, it tells of her struggles with the language barrier and then onto getting to see a show and getting hooked on the wrestling product.
From there you go onto how she meets up with the Hardy Brothers, and her start on the independent scenes, which eventually led to her booking with the renegade promotion ECW, which was the needed pathway to get her to WWE. The reason I'm not going too much into detail about the actual path taken is because I don't want to be spoiling the book to anyone who'd be interested in reading it, either before or because of this review.
However a couple of interesting parts to bring up to whet the potential reader's appetite for the book, there's tales from where she took a chance to appear on national television with WWE whilst she was on a week to week contract with ECW and how she found that Tommy Dreamer (one of the booking staff at ECW who is also known for being a wrestler) was none too happy at her doing it as well as how she reacted to fellow WWE Superstar Stacy Keibler when she thought that Keibler was hitting on her boyfriend.
But away from all of that there's one part of the tale that is extremely inspirational to myself, mainly because in my own personal life I've gone through a similar yet lot less harsh reality of it. A lot of you may have heard of an American Sci-Fi TV Show called Dark Angel - well Lita had a 1-episode part on the series, in which she had to do a Hurricanrana move (for none-wrestling fans imagine someone jumping wrapping their legs around the opponents neck, then arching back pulling the opponent with them), this is a move she's done countless times before but she felt it only right to go through some training with her co-star on the show - the show's producers said no, call it sods law, call it what you will but she ended up landing on the floor head first.
Over the next week or so she was mis-diagnosed by more than one doctor, and actually continued to travel with the WWE and make appearances whilst in constant pain, eventually one of the WWE's specialist doctors on spine and neck injuries diagnosed a broken neck and she was instantly taken in for treatment.
The last few chapters of the book actually focus on Lita's recovery from this injury, how she focussed on the training given to her to keep fit, how she returned to the WWE screens and the sort of things she did to keep her life as normal as possible, the actual tale ends just before she was scheduled to be back on-screen full time.
You may ask why it is that I personally find this tale inspiring? It's because I've lived a lot lighter version of it at the start of this year where for 3 weeks I was walking around with one of the plates in my neck fractured and more than one doctor had misdiagnosed it. Because of this when I recently re-read this book I found myself identifying with the feelings told by Lita, and how she wanted her life to just be normal, and the kinds of things she did to find that.
Overall thoughts? The books good - its one of the better wrestling autobiographies and if it wasn't for the fact that Mick Foley is a writing god, then it'd be in my top 3 wrestling books of all time, but its still very very good. My reasons? Going through the book, Krugman's wrote it almost as if it was you sat there interviewing Lita in a bar or a coffee shop somewhere, the story actually seems personal, a nice little quirk being a random top ten list of her favourite things inserted in the book here and there. But there's also the insight into backstage politics that she puts across, mostly from her ECW days but even a little bit from her current time with the WWE, and finally its the inspiration ability of the book, it makes you feel that you too can live your dreams, it makes you think that you can overcome any bad situation that you come across, and it just makes you feel better about yourself.
So if you're a wrestling fan, or just interested in reading a personal tale that's a bit different from the norm, I'd strongly recommend getting this autobiography, even more-so as its only £6.59 on Amazon at the minute.
Evaluate this review
How helpful would this review be to someone making a buying decision? Rating guidelines
This product has not yet been reviewed. 
