A Bum Deal: An Unlikely Journey from Hopeless to Humanitarian.
Hannah, Rufus (Author) Sep 2010. 256 p. Sourcebooks, hardcover, $24.99. (9781402244711). 361.7.

Booklist gave A Bum Deal starred review in the September 1 issue. “Hannah’s recollections of his mental state at the time are almost heartbreaking in their honesty and intensity…remarkable story of personal redemption.”

By: David Pitt

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 years 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 its 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.