| Horsemen reviews, media.
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 version, August 2006, p. 52)
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.
Australian Literary Review
...hilarious and horrifying... eating competitions have become... surplus culture's form of organised worship.
California Literary Review
[**** four stars] 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.
The Times (UK)
...invaluable...
Entertainment Weekly
With colorful prose to capture the unique drama, Fagone offers a probing look at a curious pastime. Grade: A-
Newsday
...a sly and vivid debunking, with liberal quotes from Kafka, E.L. Doctorow and Don DeLillo... What started as a P.R. engine with an edge of satire -- of sports, its journalists and its fans -- has become for many a serious pursuit, even if the exact significance eludes them... it's for their sake Fagone feels compelled to find a "less impoverished language," a story that might secure their dignity, whether or not competitive eating is really the salve they seek...
The Village Voice
Of Sonya "the Black Widow" Thomas, the 99-pound, top-ranked competitive eater in America, Fagone wryly notes her "star-shaped barrettes where devil's horns would be." A stylish miniaturist, Fagone doesn't strain his subjects -- people named El Wingador and Tim "Eater X" Janus -- with undue reverence...
James Fallows, national correspondent, The Atlantic Monthly *
Apart from being hilarious, "Horsemen" is a really impressive piece of work -- insightful, elegantly written, humane, and simply fascinating. You should be proud. I want to congratulate you on an outstanding piece of work. I'm delighted that the Atlantic will be able to highlight it.
(* taken from a private email, reprinted here with permission)
David Giffels, WSKU-FM
I just finished Jason Fagone's Horsemen of the Esophagus: Competitive Eating and the Big Fat American Dream. Full disclosure: I was interviewed by the author when he was in Northeast Ohio following the crumb-strewn trail of self-created speed eating legend Dave "Coondog" O'Karma. Fagone spent a year on the speed eating circuit and has managed to write a startlingly elegant and big-hearted book that transcends the carnival self-parody of eating contests to find some deeper insight into celebrity, gluttony and individual yearning in the early 21st century. It is as American as apple pie, assuming you devoured that pie at at breakneck speed.
Jesse Berrett's 'What I'm Reading' blog
Whoever thought of the title deserves a medal. 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...
Wall Street Journal
With the calorie cops yanking soda machines from schools and indicting Ronald McDonald as a career criminal, it is a stunning act of dissent to serve up a book on the glories of competitive eating. By extolling contests wherein participants try to cram more comestibles down their gullets than the next guy, Jason Fagone isn't advocating mega-ingestion as a daily habit, though his amused style will not please the scolds. He is simply fascinated by the competitors and their methods...
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.
Washington City Paper
So why compete at all, if you're on the losing end of the American dream, with even your ability to put away pounds of scrapple totally dwarfed by the medically inexplicable talents of weedy Far Easterners? Because, Fagone decides, "[If] the eaters have taught me anything, it's that to run straight at trash culture, to engage it and live inside, is a complex and contradictory act." Wing Bowl 13 is Fagone's stunningly successful attempt to do just that himself.... Even small-town fairs, it turns out, are no match for the big dumb American culture he's been playing chicken with. But Fagone takes refuge in the happy villagers' obliviousness to how quickly they, too, are traveling down pop culture's gullet, learning to love the "brief berserk moment" when the inherent weirdness in our national character manifests itself...
Boldtype
He nails competitive eating's vaguely depressing subtext -- the eaters take the pastime dead seriously even as the rest of the world sees nothing but sideshow -- and, most important, he doesn't patronize or condescend to his subjects. It would have been easy to turn the book into a snarkfest, but Fagone realizes that, eccentricities aside, all the eaters want is validation that their lives have meaning...
Flavorpill
Jason Fagone's Horsemen of the Esophagus isn't simply an exposition of the uniquely American sport of competitive eating, but an indictment of a society hell-bent on gorging itself to death while taking the rest of the world with it.
The Scotsman
Fagone's isn't the first book to try to make some sense of the growth of this phenomenon, but it is by far the best. This is a fascinating, often amusing examination of a pastime that for most sane people is as morally reprehensible as it is worryingly unhealthy. Fagone is clearly intrigued by the idea of speed eating. Within a chapter, so is the reader.
Dork Geek Nerd weblog
However, despite the almost identical subject matter of "Horsemen Of The Esophagus" and "Eat This Book", the former is the superior work. Fagone's writing is denser; unashamedly literate, thought-filled and provocative. His characters are more than just a series of quick sketches -- they are constantly evolving, even if that means contradicting themselves or falling out of favour. Fagone is also unarguably the more impartial, agonising over a free T-shirt while Nerz runs IFOCE events and even tries his stomach at competing. I don't want to totally dump on "Eat This Book" -- it's an easily digested intro to a fascinating sport/way of life. It's just that following it up with "Horsemen" is like watching Kobayashi in '01. The competition's totally outclassed.
Cleveland Magazine
You'll never look at a plate of hot dogs the same way again.
Austin Chronicle
Fagone writes very well...
Philadelphia Citypaper
...genuinely corrosive yet touching...
DailyLocal.com
[A] quest to unveil the allure of eating contests and unravel the mystery of "gluttony without consequence, gorging without fatness."
San Diego Reader
...the lad can write...
New York Times piece on Xtreme Eating by William Grimes
Cityspecific blog
Much & Fast Japanese eating blog review
interview podcast, The Michael Smerconish Show, WPHT-AM
interview podcast, Sidetrack show, WILL-AM
interview, National Public Radio's Weekend Edition with Linda Wertheimer
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