The Total Sports Illustrated Book of Boxing
No other sport can boast a body of literature that begins withHomer,Theocritus, andPlato; advances throughVirgil; matures through the pens ofO. Henry,Jack London, andGeorge Bernard Shaw; and flourishes in the hands ofHemingway,Norman Mailer, andDavid Remnick. But then, boxing is such a primal experience that it draws a distinctly muscular prose from writers who've gotten close enough to stand toe to toe and take it on.W.C. Heinz, one of the 20th century's towering sports writers, andNathan Wardhave pulled together a remarkable literary stable of fiction, reportage, poetry, profiles, essays, and commentaries to build a tome worthy of being calledThe Book of Boxing. It's an anthology with a punch, certainly; but like boxing itself, it is aboutboth art and strength, finesse and force, defeat and victory. Fight aficionados will find plenty of old friends here: all of the above, for starters, plus Frank Menke's classic account of the Dempsey-Firpo brawl, Jimmy Cannon, Joe Louis, Mark Kram on the Thrilla in Manila, andJames T. Farrell's brutal short story, "Twenty-Five Bucks." But you don't have to be a fight fan to appreciate the action; aficionados of good writing should just take a ringside seat and prepare to be knocked out again and again.--Jeff Silverman