Book Review: 'Chyna'

If The Rock and Mankind can pen autobiographies, why not Chyna? After all, the WWF star (née Joanie Laurer) is the closest thing pro wrestling has to a feminist pioneer, being the first woman to defeat a man in a title match. (Hey, it beats a career as arm candy.) This ambling rags-to-ringside tale follows Laurer from her beginnings as an insecure child of divorce, through an aimless early adulthood littered with abandoned vocations (beeper saleswoman, belly dancer) to her eventual WWF breakthrough. Plodding through her prose — pumped up and weighed down with relentlessly cavalier, faux-chatty flourishes — often requires a bodybuilder's stamina. But fans won't mind, since Laurer dutifully dishes dirt on her former romance with WWF star Triple H, the trauma of her ruptured breast implant, and other equally titillating backstage blowouts. B-