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PRESS & BOOK REVIEWS

May 4, 2008
San Francisco Chronicle Best Sellers
Beer, Blood and Cornmeal debuts at #9 on the San Francisco Chronicle's Bay Area Bestseller list in quality paperbacks.

April 22, 2008
Irony is a Bitch
Laury Silvers, Slam! Wrestling
""Well-observed and sharply funny. (Calhoun’s) characterizations nicely communicate the wrestlers’ addiction to performance and risk-taking in and out of the ring.”

April 22, 2008
Look Back in Anger
Michael Leaverton, SF Weekly
"...(Bob Calhoun's) memoir of those turbulent times, Beer, Blood and Cornmeal, reveals more than what we have any right to expect from a man who presided over matches pitting lions against Christians and a pedophile against a young boy."

April 17, 2008
'Beer, Blood and Cornmeal': Wild wrestling
Reyhan Harmanci, The San Francisco Chronicle
"...a behind-the-scenes look at one of the best oddities to come out of the Bay Area over the past few decades: Incredibly Strange Wrestling."

April 17, 2008
Alex Marvez's weekly look at professional wrestling
Alex Marvez, Scripps Howard News Service
"'...Wrestling is a form of theater designed to produce mass hysteria.'"

April 16, 2008
Our weekly picks; What to do April 16-22, 2008
Johnny Ray Huston, San Francisco Bay Guardian
"Bob Calhoun is qualified to write Beer, Blood, and Cornmeal (ECW Press). For one thing, as Count Dante, he ruled the San Francisco-based, lucha libre– and Cash Flagg–inspired phenom known as Incredibly Strange Wrestling, even taking on a Sasquatch in the ring. For another, he loves to grapple with colorful words. Calhoun traces his passion for writing back to a childhood spent prizing the comic books and Famous Monsters of Filmland magazines on spinning racks at dime stores. He celebrates the release of his latest literary labor with a reading at Edinburgh Castle, where he's often told an extra large, if not tall, tale. Will the fish-and-chips fly like the tortillas once did?"

March 5, 2008
Wrestling With Suburbia
Gary Singh, The Metro (Silicon Valley)
"('Beer, Blood and Cornmeal') just makes you want to don a leopard skin and get paid 20 bucks to go in the ring and beat up a dude in a chicken suit."

Oct 20, 2007
Festival Report : After the (Lit)Quake 2007
Suzanne Kleid mentions Bob Calhoun's reading at Litquake 2007 in
her
KQED blog.

August 23, 2005
Pub pays tribute to a true Scot -- Canadian James Doohan
Jane Ganahl, San Francisco Chronicle
"Writer Bob Calhoun, in a closing toast, offers a compromise: "Let there be no more arguing about which city should honor Scotty! I say put his plaque at the steps of the Scottish Parliament!" And glasses are lifted with a "Hear, hear!" Scotty the Fixer would have been proud.

December 22, 2004
The Pub in Publishing: Readings and writings at the Edinburgh Castle
Karen Zuercher, SF Weekly
"Bob Calhoun brings a preacher's zeal to his satiric evangelism in praise of obesity. Several tubby Santas cheer in support. It's over in an hour, and then a band takes the stage."

Sunday, July 14, 2002
Edinburgh Castle a literary fortress in the Tenderloin
Anne N. Marino, San Francisco Chronicle
"Later that night a Count Dante from Incredibly Strange Wrestling does a God-knows-what performance art piece about the surgeon general"