Mar 30, 2010 - 3:18:43 PM

By: Eric Hobaugh, MMATorch Specialist

The most fascinating chapter in the book is chapter one. Jens establishes his early childhood with accounts of his abusive father and the terror he caused within his own family. The brutality of his childhood is evident in the very first line of the book and is the underlying theme throughout the story. It is typical in most sports autobiographies for the first few chapters to set up the life of the athlete, and this can make for a slow read. The reader is instantly pulled into this story, however, and this makes the book hard to put down.

Defining the most boring chapter in this book is difficult, because the entire story is interesting. Having said that, chapter two does drag some, in that it covers the time when Jens is very young and describes how he grows up at Long Acres race track in Maple Valley, Washington. The chapter does of a nice job of setting up what his life would bring later at the track.

The missing chapter is an entire book that covers his life from 2003 to the present. The book closes in 2003 with Jens Pulver winning a majority decision over B.J. Penn in their epic battle for the UFC lightweight title. He has lost 7 of his last 8 fights since then and struggles for relevance in the MMA world in 2010. The book will be written, it is only a matter of when.

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Eric Hobaugh is the new MMA Torch book reviewer. He breaks his review
of MMA books into four formats that are published weekly, typically
every Monday.

For a listing or previous BOOK REVIEW columns, [CLICK HERE]

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