Both Members of the Club
Is it a boxing novel?  Or a love story?  More the latter, I think.  Either way, Adam Berlin's Both Members of the Club is fine and memorable work, a poignant reminder that lovers, like fighters, are inevitably educated in the ways of loss.-Mark Kriegel,  author of The Good Son: The Life of Ray "Boom Boom" ManciniThe moment I finished Adam Berlin's novel Both Members of the Club, I at once understood what had been causing me to pause, reflect, and then read on--almost like stepping back during a fight and then charging forward again at your opponent.   It was the question that was there from start to finish, as it is for all of us every day of our lives--what do we fight for?  Like a powerful hook, this book surprises and shatters.-Teddy Atlas, ESPN commentator and boxing trainerAn astonishingly personal and touching account of a trio of friends who have emerged from a parentless, family-less childhood to form a lifetime bond...Berlin displays and dramatizes the physical ordeal of training, of boxing, and offers it without romance, without ideal, but also without apology. It's a stunning story that resonates long after the last page is turned.-Clay Reynolds, author of The Vigil and Franklin's CrossingBerlin continues to explore the themes that fascinate him--redemption, violence, loyalty--and his readers will be fascinated in turn.  His lean prose and kinetic boxing scenes make for one hard-hitting novella.-BooklistBerlin has written a first-rate novella about that which puts our backs to the ropes and knocks us and our illusions down and sometimes --out. Like Billy Carlyle, the best of us will go down swinging, but we're all headed in the same direction.  Here's to the losers, Berlin says without saying, bless us all.-Springs Toledo, author of The Gods of War: Boxing Essays