The A Bum Deal: An Unlikely Journey from Hopeless to Humanitarian It's feature *Starred Review* For a few years in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Rufus Hannah was a movie icon. He was the star of Bumfights, a series of underground videos in which homeless people fought each other for money and booze (mostly booze). This moving autobiography, cowritten with Hannah’s friend Barry Soper, takes him from his early years as the son of alcoholic parents, through his time of homelessness and habitual drinking, to the present day (he now works as a property manager and travels the country giving talks for the National Coalition for the Homeless). But the book’s most fascinating and unsettling segment involves Hannah’s years as a participant in Bumfights: he was beating people up and performing extremely difficult stunts, all for the promise of beer (and a vaguer promise of a small fortune, further down the road). Hannah’s recollections of his mental state at the time, of “the monster inside my gut that needed alcohol so bad,” of feeling “more like a pig than a man,” are almost heartbreaking in their honesty and intensity. Expect this remarkable story of personal redemption to receive considerable media attention.
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