A Flame of Pure Fire: Jack Dempsey and the Roaring '20s

""He was the wild and raucous champion of the wild and raucous 1920s,"" writes Kahn (The Boys of Summer, etc.) of the legendary heavyweight William Harrison ""Jack"" Dempsey. This ""hobo, roughneck, brawler, fighter, slacker, lover, millionaire, gentleman"" provides Kahn a vehicle for chronicling the jazz age itself. Dempsey emerged out of the still-wild West, having fought in mining towns throughout Utah and Colorado, lean and hungry for success as his country stood on the precipice of unprecedented wealth and power. His transformation from rural tough, the ""Manassa Mauler,"" into the preeminent athlete in the world marked the arrival of sport as big business in a prosperous new America. When he won the heavyweight championship in 1919, Dempsey did it in front of 20,000 people. Less than eight years later, he drew a crowd of 120,000 for his first bout with Gene Tunney (which he lost), still the largest ever in boxing, and made a fortune. In graceful and fluid prose, Kahn presents the con men, gangsters, prostitutes and starlets who inhabited the turbulent, Prohibition-era story of Jack Dempsey. The larger-than-life storytellers of the age--legendary sportswriters like Grantland Rice, Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon--feature prominently. Kahn delivers a performance of which any of those whiskey-swilling, rakish scribes would have been proud. (Oct.)