BOOK REVIEW - 100 Things WWE Fans Should Know And Do Before They Die (2019)

Bryan Alvarez - he of Figure Four Weekly, F4WOnline, Bryan & Vinny, and MINUS FIVE STARS fame - wrote another book. This time, he wrote one on his own, as opposed to sharing the spotlight with R.D. Reynolds, as was the case with the previous literary endeavor, The Death Of WCW.

100 Things WWE Fans Should Know And Do Before They Die is essentially one of those list-type things, where you have 100 different topics of relative importance and each topic has a number of paragraphs dedicated to it. Some entries in the book have more space dedicated to it than others, while others have little more than short blurbs dedicated to it. In the case of the short blurbs, you sometimes wish there was more that could be expanded upon, but then again, some of these topics could very well be subjects for their own books in and of themselves.

The book opens with a forward from Lance Storm, who is something of a literary connoisseur in addition to be a former wrestler and trainer of future wrestlers. Once you somehow get past that without falling asleep, you get the rest of the book, which hits you with all the basic historical bits to bring a newcomer to the WWE bubble up to speed. And that's pretty much the whole aim of the book; it's essentially something that you can give to a newcomer to get them up to speed on what this whole thing is about. The topics covered aren't delved into deeply, but that's not the point of this book. And once you get past that, it does what it aims to do just fine.

There's nothing in this book that longtime fans of the genre doesn't already know before, but serves as a nice reference and Bryan's wit is more or less on full display here. There's even a couple entries written by other people who know more about certain bits than he does, which shows some level of humbleness that is normally lacking.