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Raging Bull: My Story | 
 enlarge | Authors: Jake La Motta, Joseph Carter, Peter Savage
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Category: Book
List Price: $16.95
Buy Used: $4.95
You Save: $12.00 (71%)
New (31) Used (19) Collectible (1) from $4.95
Rating:  17 reviews
Sales Rank: 483636
Media: Paperback
Pages: 222
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.7
Dimensions (in): 8.1 x 5.4 x 0.6
ISBN: 0306808080
Dewey Decimal Number: 796.83092
EAN: 9780306808081
ASIN: 0306808080
Publication Date: August 21, 1997
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
In prose as straightforward and at times as brutal as his style in the ring, former middleweight champion Jake LaMotta wove together an unforgettable autobiography: first published in 1970, Raging Bull was violent, candid, primitive, smart, and altogether powerful. It still is. His story, adapted for the screen in 1980 by Martin Scorsese in the Oscar-winning film starring Robert De Niro, is filled with anger--at his father for beating him, at the neighborhood he grew up in, at the petty criminal he became, at the Mob that tried to keep him from the title because he wouldn't take a dive--and real candor about the dive he did take (out in the real world when his boxing career was over). While most of LaMotta's anger was self-directed, he harnessed enough of it to power him to 83 victories in 106 fights, and a two-year hold on a championship belt. His recounting of his ring wars with Sugar Ray Robinson and Marcel Cerdan remain as convincingly primal on the page as they were in the arena.
Product Description
Meet Jake La Motta: thief, rapist, killer. Raised in the Bronx slums, he fought on the streets, got sent to reform school, and served time in prison. Trusting no one, slugging everyone, he beat his wife, his best friends, even the mobsters who kept the title just out of reach. But the same forces that made him a criminal—fear, rage, jealousy, self-hate, guilt—combined with his drive and intelligence to make him a winner in the ring. At age twenty-seven, after eight years of fighting, he became Middleweight Champion of the World, a hero to thousands. Then, at the peak of success, he fell apart and began a swift, harrowing descent into nightmare. Raging Bull, the Bronx Bull's brutally candid memoir, tells it all—fights, jails, sex, money—surpassing, in hard-hitting prose, even the movie that immortalized it.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 12 more reviews...
Raw December 1, 2008
Lee Eastwood (Utah, USA)
This book is very very raw and gritty. I saw the movie before I read the book so I started reading with certain expectations but it went above and beyond. The writing style is simple; I'm pretty sure anyone (who likes the sport) will be able to get into it. Jake LaMotta is a love/hate kind of guy with a very sad life even considering that as a reader I did care about what would happen to him during certain incidents... The book was a quick read (read it on an airplane)...once I finished it pretty much stayed with me...unlike many other books I have read. This is probably my new favorite book to date.
Amazing story of a hell of an interesting man July 26, 2008
M. Lynch (Brooklyn, NY United States)
Beyond what the public has seen from Jake Lamottas incredible bouts in the ring, there is much more people should know about Lamottas life. Through this book you will uncover Jake lamottas Physical and mental struggles, whether it be taking a tremendous amount of abuse in the ring and still staying on both of his feet, Or his madness at home with his family and closest friends. He tells his separate problems which included his best friend, his wife(s), and the mafia. His childhood alone as a thug living in tenements in the early Bronx will draw you to read more and soon you will start to understand where all the rage came from.
A written TKO January 10, 2007
love the written word (LA)
"Bull" is one of the most powerful biography's written. La Motta went step by step relaying his life story, in a transparent way. He not only draws us in round by round to him being on the top of the world, he also clearly gives the reader his blow by blow decent into hell, and even worse for a showman, anonymity. He became a nobody, because of his unhealthy actions.
I for one give La Motta a tremendious amount of credit, for coming to terms with his greatest opponent and knocking him on the mat, himself.
The movie is equally as engrosing.
Great read.
A Page Turner - More Like A Page Pounder September 19, 2004
Buster Paris (Boston, MA)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
A Page Turner - More Like A Page Pounder
Reading this book I felt like Sugar Ray Fighting La Motta - couldn't put it down -
OK - that's a stretch, but you get the idea. I could not put this book down. It reads like a bull charges. A little bit of wind up - I'd say the first 19 pages - then it's a charging bull.
Jake's story is much more than what the movie shows and is different.
As we all know and heard so many times - the book is always better than the movie and again it's very true here - the book is Jake's exact story not changed one hair for Hollywood. It's such an intense, real and gritty story.
It starts off in Jake's childhood as a tuff Bronx kid taking a beating from his father and the world - and as he got older the beatings continue and get worse - the biggest beatings coming from himself.
La Motta is brutally honest and doesn't try to hide anything or paint himself in a special light. It's a powerful and straightforward look at his life, his heart and a candid look at the sport of boxing back then.
It's a great book, you'll pound through the pages like a raging bull.
The Greatest Sport Yarn Ever Told April 6, 2004
Inspector2211
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
There just isn't another biography/autobiography involving an athlete that can measure up to RAGING BULL. The book depicts self-hate and the self-destruction that goes with it in the kind of succinct style you expect from a ghetto-bred boxer. What sets it apart though is that what one finds between the lines is often more revealing than the lines themselves. Jake's method of confessing to grotesque acts without the vocabulary of rationalization says volumes about the pathologies behind them. Instead of getting lost in Freudian buzzwords, La Motta recounts his life in terms that sum up and surpass every treatise on self-destruction ever written. No need for Psychology 101. RAGING BULL is the real textbook on the subject.
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