- ISBN13: 9781861894113
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
Product Description
Boxing is one of the oldest and most exciting of sports: its bruising and bloody confrontations have permeated Western culture since 3000 BC. During that period, there has hardly been a time in which young men, and sometimes women, did not raise their gloved or naked fists to one other. Throughout this history, potters, sculptors, painters, poets, novelists, cartoonists, song-writers, photographers and film-makers have been there to record and make sense of it all. … More >>
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
This is not a book for detailed fight histories of Joe Louis and Sugar Ray Robinson; it is probably more “cultural history” than “boxing”; it is somehow both heavily-footnoted and fun reading. It turns out that boxing provides a fascinating lens through which to view the past. The author shows boxing affecting every level of society and appearing in seemingly every form of art. It has come and gone from mainstream fashion more than once. As the author puts it at the end of the first chapter, boxing seems to contain a “mixture . . . which has made it for so long and so productively a way to imagine conflict”.
Rating: 5 / 5
Kasia Boddy’s book is the most thorough, entertaining, and informative book on boxing I’ve ever seen. The color illustrations are dazzling. She is a marvel. If you’d like to hear my WPKN interview with Kasia from last year:
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Rating: 5 / 5
I was given this–wouldn’t have imagined that I was interested in boxing. After reading the section on Dickens (the reason I was given the book), I started the preceding chapter, then started from the beginning, then had to read the end. Boddy’s writing is so witty and interesting and her bits of information so thought-provoking that I kept wanting to read it to friends. (I had to explain all my references to ‘claret,’ Regency slang for ‘blood.’) Everyone I’ve shown it to has found a different reason for wanting to read it. It’s a bit like an encyclopaedia and provides the same pleasure as the Oxford Companion to Food. The illustrations are wonderful.
This book makes a wonderful present, even to oneself.
Rating: 5 / 5
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