The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

Here's a link to the Blood Brothers release by Randy Roberts and Johnny Williams. It's about the intertwined lives of Malcolm X and Ali for the short time they knew each other before Malcolm assassinated. Roberts wrote a Jack Dempsey Bio, often considered the most definitive bio of Jack Johnson, ie Papa Jack. This new release would likely be the definitive book for that Ali/Malcolm brief moment in time caught in the zero sum game of American blood politics and religion.

Muhammad Ali And Malcolm X: A Broken Friendship, An Enduring Legacy : Code Switch : NPR

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

I cannot recall the title, but Aaron Pryor's life story was phenomenal. As was the four kings book.

I have been trying to obtain a copy of Meldrick Taylor's book, entitled two seconds from glory, but it has been impossible to track down. Can anyone help please?

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

Remarkable amount.

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

I cannot recall the title, but Aaron Pryor's life story was phenomenal. As was the four kings book.

I have been trying to obtain a copy of Meldrick Taylor's book, entitled two seconds from glory, but it has been impossible to track down. Can anyone help please?

Two Seconds From Glory is available on Amazon.ca for more than $999.11 not including shipping, at this current time.

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

If anyone could find this scan it and upload it I would be most thankful: The gifted one : Kirkland Laing through the eyes of others.

The book is available in UK libraries and but is very expensive to buy costing hundreds of dollars from private sellers on Amazon.

Available at :

Sunderland Libraries

City Library and Arts Centre

Sunderland, SR1 1RE United Kingdom

Nottinghamshire Libraries

Nottingham, NG2 7QP United Kingdom

Warwickshire Library and Information Service

Warwickshire Libraries

Warwick, CV34 4TH United Kingdom

Essex Libraries

Chelmsford, CM2 0EW United Kingdom

The British Library, St. Pancras

London, NW1 2DB United Kingdom

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

--- Problem being is that the electronics are tragically being put into a permanent sleep mode everytime Laing is mentioned, an expensive proposition for sure that might explain the skyrocketing resale prices of his original published limited edition.

:smiley-signs097:

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

Book Review: Johnny Risko; The Cleveland Rubber Man by Jerry Fitch

by Jim Amato

Growing up in Cleveland and becoming a boxing fan at an early age, I had heard of Johnny Risko. I knew he was a heavyweight contender in the 1920’s and 30’s. He fought many of the best with mixed results. That was about as much as I knew about him.

Read more: Book Review: Johnny Risko; The Cleveland Rubber Man by Jerry Fitch - - Boxing News - Ring News24

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

Jack Scarrott’s Prize Fighters - Memoirs of a Welsh Boxing Booth Showman

by Lawrence Davies

From the Back Cover :

‘Fifty years I’ve been in the game, mister, and all that time I’ve been right here in the mining valleys. I know every town and village in South Wales, and I knew every boxer worth calling a fighting man they ever turned out. Dai St. John, Tom Thomas, Jim Driscoll, Freddy Welsh, Johnny Basham, Jimmy Wilde, Percy Jones, and many more that were before their time. I knew them all, and a good few started with me in my booth. I was scrapping for a living in a boxing booth before I started a booth on my own, and I was only about twenty one when I started on my own. Believe me, the life of a booth boxer in those days was tough. Mountain fighters! That’s what they called the miners who used to fight bare-knuckle on the mountains…’

Page not found - - Boxing News - Ring News24

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

--- Whoohoooo! Ordered half dozen boxing classics thru a local bookseller online for a song and the first arrived today.

AJ Liebling maybe the best boxing writer ever. Neutral Corner a collection of his essays published in the New Yorker from 1952 to 1990, and since he passed in 1963, it means they published previously unpublished stuff. Quite the gormond as well and he applies those higher appreciations to his observations of boxing. More pearls to be delivered soon.

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

--- Double WhoooHooo! Next set arrived.

Going the Distance about the history of Canadian Boxing, rather arcane but a good reference book, Blood Season by Phil Berger published in 1989 about Tyson just as he was beginning to implode, and The Pictorial History of Boxing by Nat Fleischer in 1959 updated to 1975 just after his death. Has the painting by Hogarth(sp) of James Figg who was quite the handsome fellow with a luxuriant long flowing mane of real hair. Who knew Brit men ever had hair?

A. J. Liebling:

"Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly. They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch. By the time they reach New York, they are like Golden Bantam that has been trucked up from Texas - stale and unprofitable. The consumer forgets that the corn tastes different where it grows."

"If you just try long enough and hard enough, you can always manage to boot yourself in the posterior."

"I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better."

"In the restaurant on the Rue Saint-Augustin, Parisian actor and gourmand Yves Mirande would dazzle his juniors, French and American, by dispatching a lunch of raw Bayonne ham and fresh figs, a hot sausage in crust, spindles of filletedpike in a rich rose sauce Nantua, a leg of lamb larded withanchovies, artichokes on a pedestal of foie gras, and four or five kinds of cheese, with a good bottle of Bordeaux and one of champagne, after which he would call for the Armagnac and remind Madame to have ready for dinner the larks and ortolans she had promised him, with a few langoustes and aturbot — and, of course, a fine civet made from the marcassin, or young wild boar, that the lover of the leading lady in his current production had sent up from his estate in the Sologne. "And while I think of it," I once heard him say, "we haven't had any woodcock for days, or truffles baked in the ashes, and the cellar is becoming a disgrace — no more '34s and hardly any '37s. Last week, I had to offer my publisher a bottle that was far too good for him, simply because there was nothing between the insulting and the superlative."

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

--- Wow, a big tal doozy arrived, The Saga of The Fist, The 9000 Year Story of Boxing by John V Grombach who was an Olympic US boxer in 1924 and major player in ww2 intelligence operations and too many other particulars to mention. Googled him and these intelligence operations discussed on a forum by other officer/vets.

The Pond - JFK Assassination Debate - The Education Forum

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

--- The last ordered arrived, Championship Fighting by Jack Dempsey, 1st published in 1950. Copyright renewed by the Mauler hisself in 1978, this version published in 2015 and brand new.

Bruce Lee reportedly used punching and footwork techniques into his system of combined martial arts, and perhaps more importantly, Dempsey philosophy of assessing the circumstances and setting of any public encounter to adjust the self defense methodology.

I'm a happy camper...

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

http://www.ringnews24.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/David-Rodriguez.jpg

Heavyweight David Rodriguez: "When The Lights Go Out"

"One thing, though, is certain. 'When the Lights Go Out' is his 36th and best knockout." Bill Knight, El Paso Times

Positive reviews and media attention are pouring in for former heavyweight contender and fan favorite David "Nino" Rodriguez, on the strength of his new book, "When The Lights Go Out," a powerful memoir of his life growing up as a fighter.

Available through amazon.com, "When the Lights Go Out" is priced at $17.95 (paperback) and $7.95 (Kindle).

In an inspiring tale of a bullied child growing into a fearsome warrior, El Paso, Texas-based Rodriguez, who went 35-2 as a professional including 35 KOs, winning four regional championships along the way, manages to pull at the reader's heart strings while never shying away from the brutal realities he experienced.

Read more: Heavyweight David Rodriguez: "When The Lights Go Out" - - Boxing News - Ring News24

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

My Brother The Boxer, The Terry Daniel Story by Jeff Daniels

This interesting self published book follows 7 years of Texas heavyweight contender Terry Daniels from his brief debut with the Southern Methodist University Mustang football team to his title challenge of champion Joe Frazier in New Orleans the day before Superbowl V in 1972. 70 million viewers are estimated to have watched Frazier to defend against Daniels on free terrestial TV for context to today.

While not a pure biography, it can be seen as an ethnographic record of a young man born into a loving middle class family during the Harry Truman presidency to mature during the Vietnam War torn, racial rioting America of the 1960s. Raised in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio, he has to come to Texas for his first bar fights, first love and marriage, and rapid rise to stardom in boxing after a knee injury ended his football aspirations.

This coming of age in the mythologized '60s is as much God, family, honor, and country as the machinations of a storied boxing era of Texas amateur boxing with Floyd Patterson, Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali, and of course Terry Daniels.

Amazon.com: My Brother the Boxer: The Terry Daniels Story (9781515005018): Jeff Daniels: Books

www.mybrothertheboxer.com

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

--- Dan Stuarts Fistic Carnival

Dan should be in the boxing HOF with a star on Hollywood Blvd. He was a turn of the century promoter fighting back state and US regulations banning boxing while promoting the earliest cinematography development. In this case, it was the fitzsimmons/maher heavyweight title match of 1896 in Langtry, Texas where Judge Roy Bean was the law west of the pecos river. Hundreds took the train to Langtry to face down a platoon of armed texas rangers with orders to shoot to kill. The complexities of the various political posturing a enough to baffle any savant genius.

Leo N Miletich the scholastic author who discovered this seminal story of boxing and cinema history.

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

Day of the locusts,

Absolutely brilliant insight into the shady world of promoting in the 80's/90's and just how far one went to try and gain his big money maker. Have read this about 4 or 5 times now and can't put it down once I start. Go read it and be amazed.

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

Day of the locusts,

 

Absolutely brilliant insight into the shady world of promoting in the 80's/90's and just how far one went to try and gain his big money maker. Have read this about 4 or 5 times now and can't put it down once I start. Go read it and be amazed.

I will seek it out pal. I recommend Flight of the hawk, the Aaron Pryor story.

Also the four kings, I am sure you know who they are referring to.

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

'My View from the Corner, A Life in Boxing' (Angelo Dundee with Bert Sugar), 'Unforgivable Blackness' and 'The Great White Hopes' (re: Jack Johnson), 'The Life and Crimes of Don King' (by Jack Newfield), any book re: Muhammad Ali by Thomas Hauser or David Remnick, 'Marvelous' or 'Hitman' (both by Brian and Damien Hughes). Though Marvellous and Hitman aren't definitive, they are good reads for bios.

Like the sound of 'Day of the Locusts' and 'Flight of the Hawk' after reading reviews. The latter is £235 used on Amazon! And I baulked at paying £30 import from US for the Don King book 5 years ago!!

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

And any books (or even articles) by Donald McRae (Dark Trade)

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Ali: A Life~new bio

--- Presumably the two ISBN # reflect a different format, of what I know not, so some research may be required if you want to order the book in a certain form.

As for me, I've read just about everything that can possibly be said about Ali and grew up steeped in his era, so save a few improbable secrets of one of the most publicly accessible champs in history, not much would budge my personal opinion of his life or my rating of his boxing career, but such new corporate publishing fodder is out there for anyone wanting to read about this majic man.

Ali: A Life

Jonathan Eig

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0544435249 ISBN 13: 9780544435247

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017

The definitive biography of an American icon, from a New York Times best-selling author with unique access to Ali’s inner circle

He was the wittiest, the prettiest, the strongest, the bravest, and, of course, the greatest (as he told us himself). Muhammad Ali was one of the twentieth century’s most fantastic figures and arguably the most famous man on the planet.

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

Great topic. More to add?

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

Recently got the new books on Tony Borg, Ron Lyle and Al Bernstein.

Re: The Boxing Book thread - Recommendations

just finished bunces big fat short history of british boxing and really enjoyed it.

also cannot recommend four kings highly enough , essential

Myself and Ringnews24 have a few mentions in a brand new book. An ex-boxer, who was born in Guyana but then lived in Wales. Fantastic book!

You can buy it here: https://www.amazon.com/Little-Boy-Scared-Dario-Deabreu/dp/B09YMD2M4W

--- Joe Louis, The Great Black Hope by Richard Bak.

A rather off putting title by a non boxing fan with an atrocious black, red, and yeller dagger cover, I bought it because he did such an epic job on Ty Cobb, the turn of the century Baseball great. And though he misses many subtleties of boxing, he goes deeper into the subject of Louis than most would.