journalist and author of Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream , a nonfiction book from Crown Publishers. It's also available in the UK, where the fine people at Yellow Jersey have titled it Insatiable . In my biased opinion, the book is an interesting piece of work and worthy of your time/attention/dollars. Here's what some other people are saying:
William Leith, author of The Hungry Years, in the UK Sunday Telegraph: The first thing to say about Insatiable is that it is a full-length book about the sport -- or, if you prefer, the disgusting practice -- of competitive eating. I wasn't sure if I wanted to read 300 pages about an activity known as "gurgitating." The second thing is that the author, Jason Fagone, is absolutely superb. In many ways, he's like the young Tom Wolfe -- he wants to take you somewhere you wouldn't normally go, and then, somehow, with tremendous verve, use it to explain the state of the world. He succeeds brilliantly... when he begins to get involved with the competitors, he finds something extraordinary -- amazing characters, thwarted geniuses, showmen suffering for their art... Fagone pulls off a wonderful feat -- he makes you care about competitive eating.
GQ magazine (UK): The Tiger Woods of the sport, Kobayashi, doesn't even bother with Wing Bowl. He saves himself for Nathan's, the hot-dog munching contest that concludes both the eating season and this entertaining book on the author's year immersed in the world of professional eating. This could easily have been another arch account of gluttonous Yanks consuming themselves to death, but Fagone's exploration of class, sport and the American dream perfectly balances despairing critique with narrative thrust, and his entirely understandable affection for the crazy cast of competitors is evident on every page.
California Literary Review: Competitive eating is fun to talk about because it is so bizarre, and in producing such a clearly detailed work, he has written that rare sort of book that is a pleasure to read and talk about. [four stars]
Jesse Berrett's 'What I'm Reading' blog:
Best junk-culture book I've read yet... Highlights: a discussion of what happens, uh, after the eating stops; mostly non-mocking discussion and analysis of some lyrics by Eric "Badlands" Booker...; a surprisingly sweet interlude with American wildman Coondog O'Karma and the legendary Japanese eating machine Kobayashi (a paradigm-shattering 50 dogs at the Nathan's hot-dog contest) at an Indians game, where all the athletes flock to his side...
Los Angeles Times: His language is crisp (of the stomach he notes that it lacks "the heft of the liver, the industriousness of the heart, the mystery of the pancreas, and the transplantability of the kidneys -- like other understated valiant things, cops and tollbooths and C-SPAN, the stomach's glory is not aesthetic"), and his narrative is a pleasure to follow... Fagone captures the details of their lives.
More reviews at www.jasonfagone.com .
