Perfect I'm Not is, indeed, not a perfect book, but as in baseball, literary imperfection can make for a thrilling ride. Part Horatio Alger, part libertine, Wells peppers the narrative of his rise from poverty in Ocean Beach, California to baseball fame and fortune with numerous prurient tales from behind the locker room door. He is frank about the use of steroids among his fellow players and he's not afraid to burn major bridges (one must assume they were already on fire) in his ferocious attacks on such baseball luminaries as veteran general manager Pat Gillick. And the story behind his woozy perfect game is legend. All this is entertaining stuff and worth the price of admission.

The book, however, falls too often into a pattern of explication and justification for Wells’s "entertaining" run-ins with the law, baseball management, players, and even his own family. We learn that young Dave Wells once punched his sister and broke her jaw, but, he explains, this was because his sister had scraped his sunburned back with her fingernails. This childhood story is then repeated--in a grown up form--several times. In many cases, it does seem that he is justified in claiming innocence--or at least in claiming he got an eye for an eye. But repetition of these explications--which even include bad pitching performances caused, we learn, by nascent physical problems (elbow, shoulder, bone chips, gout, back)--take away his agency in his own story. The hero is always a victim. In the end, then, the book is as flawed as its author, offering entertaining insight--some perhaps unintentional--into the man and his game. --Patrick O’Kelley

From Publishers Weekly
Wells's rollicking memoir of his unlikely journey to the top of the hill at Yankee Stadium reads like Bull Durham rewritten by Ozzy Osbourne and Howard Stern. After a juicy setup that recounts his in-drag appearance on Saturday Night Live with teammates Derek Jeter and David Cone, Wells and Kreski settle into a three-up, three-down pace, chronicling Boomer's rise from Hells Angels mascot through the minors in barren Medicine Hat, Canada, down to winter ball in Venezuela, where he gets dysentery and is almost killed and on up to his crowning achievement: the perfect game he threw for the Yanks while hungover in 1998. The pitcher's life often resembles one of Kreski's credits, Beavis and Butt-head, resulting in a look-back-in-laughter that earns on average more than a chuckle per page. That should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever seen Wells interviewed; what's unexpected are his painstaking accounts of such turns in his life as the career-threatening back surgery he faced in 2001, to say nothing of the scrape he got into in a Manhattan diner last year with a drunken heckler. Fans will applaud because Wells's inside baseball divulges numbers as well as names, and it sketches as uncensored a portrait of today's money-and-media-saturated pro sports as they come. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Wells has been a high-quality big-league pitcher for 15 years, but more than that, he is one of the few honest-to-goodness personalities in the game. Raised on the fringes of conventional society, he has always projected a devilishly good-humored, what-the-hell attitude, and the public has loved him for it. He keeps it up in this potentially controversial autobiography in which he states early and often that stimulants and painkillers are a big part of the fabric of major-league baseball, noting that he pitched his perfect game while hung over and half drunk. He also weighs in on the steroid issue; provides insight into his current boss, Yankee owner George Steinbrenner; and discusses his disastrous one-year stint with the White Sox in 2000. Wells is a popular player still performing at the top of his game. Expect a firestorm of interest when the book first hits the street and steady demand thereafter as fans rush for a relatively unfiltered glimpse behind the scenes of major-league baseball. Wes Lukowsky
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
As he recalls a contentious meeting with sportswriters in his autobiography, Perfect I'm Not: Boomer on Beer, Brawls, Backaches & Baseball, David Wells wonders if his next book should be called "How to Lose Friends and Infuriate People."

Consider it done.

Wells became the most hated man in baseball when the galleys of Perfect I'm Not hit the streets with Wells's assertion that up to 40 percent of big leaguers were using steroids and his recollection that he was "half-drunk" when he pitched a perfect game in 1998. He quickly backpedaled on both issues, which is ironic for someone who spends most of the fast-paced and entertaining Perfect I'm Not crafting a reputation as a tell-it-like-it-is rebel. Wells harbors disdain for baseball authority figures such as Cito Gaston, Pat Gillick, and Marge Schott, and he proudly details the near-fight he had with George Steinbrenner in the Yankees' locker room.

However, there's no doubting Wells's blue-collar credentials -- he fondly recalls his Hell's Angels father figures and his summer job as a butcher -- nor his devotion to his mother. Wells writes lovingly of the woman he calls "Attitude Annie" and vividly recalls the premonition he had moments before her death. Wells also provides a refreshingly unvarnished look at life in the "bushes," replete with cockroach-infested bedrooms in Mexico and the difficulty he had keeping a roommate during his first year in pro ball. Perfect I'm Not ensures that Wells will have the same problem at the end of his career. Jerry Beach

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Forget the perfect game. Forget the World Series rings. Forget the legendary carousing, the barroom brawling, the heavy-metal head-banging, and the endless supply of uncensored, often havoc-wreaking quotes. Forget the feuds with dumb-a**ed fans, wrong-headed managers and the entire city of Cleveland. Even if Perfect, I'm Not was to blindly (and insanely) ignore all those amazing aspects of David Wells' life as a major leaguer, his story would still bounce off these pages as a wildly entertaining and jaw-droppingly honest look at the game of baseball. Nothing less would be possible. Wells simply isn't wired for spin-doctoring. He has no "delete" button. He pulls no punches. In a sport that's now largely populated by a bland collection of well-dressed, personality-free, clich￯﾿ﾽ-spouting Stepford jocks, Wells clearly holds the title of "baseball's most beloved bad-ass".

From rookie ball amid the beer-soaked, frozen tundra of the Great White North, through Winter Ball amid the easy women and explosive diarrhea of Venezuela, Perfect I'm Not explores Boomer's long, strange, often insane climb through the minors. And from the Siberia of the Blue Jays' bullpen, through intensive training with a brilliant little Yoda known as Sparky Anderson, the book also examines how Boomer grew from a mediocre reliever, into a solid, reliable, hugely successful starter. From there, after tortured dealings with Marge Schott in Cincinatti, and Pat Gillick in Baltimore, the book follows Boomer deep inside the New York Yankees' dugout, right through the teams' fairy-tale seasons of '97 and '98. It stands with David on the mound through his legendary perfect game.

It documents his high-profile love affair with the night-life of New York City, and then explores just how devastating it felt to be unceremoniously dumped for Roger Clemens. Perfect I'm Not also follows Boomer through his chronic back pain of 2001, then surgery, rehab, uncertainty, and one pinstriped Christmas miracle, courtesy of Boss Steinbrenner. And though the 2002 season may have enjoyed a less than perfect climax, it nonetheless rounds out the book with a Yankees reunion that kept Boomer smiling from February, right into October.

Perfect I'm Not gives readers an unprecedented, all-access pass to every major league stadium in the country, providing a first-person perspective of life on the diamond, as well as an uncensored, warts-and-all, insider's guide to life inside locker-rooms, hotel rooms, planes, dugouts, buses, bedrooms, restaurants, strip clubs, and more. It's great fun. It's real. It's as close as you're ever gonna get to making the show.

David Wells is one of the most colorful, honest, outspoken and genuinely funny beings on this, or any other planet.

FROM THE CRITICS

The New York Times

Reading through Perfect I'm Not, you might think Wells overcame enormous obstacles placed in his way by anal-retentive managers, pitching coaches and general managers who routinely doubted him and had the gall to wonder about his elastic girth. That is amusing, like much of the book. Perspective has never been one of Wells's strengths. His take on his baseball career is like Richard Nixon's version of Watergate. — Buster Olney

Publishers Weekly

Wells's rollicking memoir of his unlikely journey to the top of the hill at Yankee Stadium reads like Bull Durham rewritten by Ozzy Osbourne and Howard Stern. After a juicy setup that recounts his in-drag appearance on Saturday Night Live with teammates Derek Jeter and David Cone, Wells and Kreski settle into a three-up, three-down pace, chronicling Boomer's rise from Hells Angels mascot through the minors in barren Medicine Hat, Canada, down to winter ball in Venezuela, where he gets dysentery and is almost killed and on up to his crowning achievement: the perfect game he threw for the Yanks while hungover in 1998. The pitcher's life often resembles one of Kreski's credits, Beavis and Butt-head, resulting in a look-back-in-laughter that earns on average more than a chuckle per page. That should come as no surprise to anyone who has ever seen Wells interviewed; what's unexpected are his painstaking accounts of such turns in his life as the career-threatening back surgery he faced in 2001, to say nothing of the scrape he got into in a Manhattan diner last year with a drunken heckler. Fans will applaud because Wells's inside baseball divulges numbers as well as names, and it sketches as uncensored a portrait of today's money-and-media-saturated pro sports as they come. (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Few might be interested in Wells's Harley-riding, heavy-metal lifestyle if he didn't also bear down so hard when it's time to pitch: besides the World Series and other big-time games he's pitched over the years, Boomer threw a perfect game in the spring of 1998, the 14th man ever to achieve that feat. This book mixes Wells's outsized personality with his considerable mound accomplishments.

Kirkus Reviews