Cheating Death, Stealing Life: The Eddie Guerrero Story by Eddie GuerreroMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Cheating Death, Stealing Life is the biography of Eddie Guerrero, chronicling his early life up until shortly after he won the WWE Heavyweight title.
Confession Time: I was a big professional wrestling fan for a quarter of a century. Eddie Guerrero was one of my favorites ten of those years and his death was one of the big reasons I quit watching.
One of the early indicators of how much I'll like a pro-wrestling biography is how quickly they make with the wrestling action. This book wasted no time. The wrestling stuff started on page one.
Eddie covered a lot of ground in the early goings, from growing up in a wrestling family and eventually breaking into the business in Mexico. He touches on his partying lifestyle early, which is good since later parts of the book show how much that lifestyle would threaten to destroy his life. In fact, it probably contributed to his early death.
Eddie's story goes from Mexico to Japan, from ECW to WCW, and finally to the WWE and the battles with addiction that eventually got him fired. Unlike in the ring, no punches are pulled. Eddie talks about all the times drugs and alcohol nearly cost him everything, eventually seeing him living in a crappy apartment and wrestling on the independent circuit just to make ends meet. When Eddie finally got his shit together, his life got back and track and he was called back up to the WWE. It was actually pretty hard-warming for a wrestling book.
Other than my usual gripes about there not being enough interesting road stories, this was a solid book. Cheating Death, Stealing Life, frog-splashed its way into my wrestling book top ten. Four out of five stars.
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