Customer Reviews

Black Genesis: The History of the Black Prizefighter 1760-1870

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Black Genesis is a welcome edition to the storied genre of boxing literature. Never before has there been an accurate book written on the history of the black boxer. Mr. Smith obviously did his homework, using a wide variety of long forgotten sources to deftly craft this fascinating story. I particualrly enjoyed the chapter on the tragic Tom Molineaux and also loved seeing the records of all the fighters in the back of the book. Smith did a very good job in capturing the feel and flavor of bareknuckle fighting as well, using detailed descriptions with the language and terms of the day to capture the grittier aspects of the sport.
Overall, with the exception of a few typos, which must have alluded the wandering eye of Mr. Smith's editor, I found the book to be a wholly enlightening, entertaining and exhilirating ride through prizefighting history.

As I grew up in a "Boxing Town", I developed an appreciation for the sport at a very young age. I found Smith's diction to be both smoothe and precise, and the overall content of his book to be extremely interesting and informative. He speaks with expertise, yet in a manner such that someone unfamiliar with the sport could easily understand and become "hooked" on boxing. A "must read"!

The book is great and what I was looking for but the proofreading is poor - lots of basic spelling errors that one rarely sees nowadays like were spelt where and Egan and Eagan (the same person) on the same page.

Kevin R. Smith's Black Genesis: The History of the Black Prizefighter 1760-1870 provides detailed research and findings not known to casual boxing fans that unveil and introduce names noteworthy of recognition and respect in regards to the annals of prizefighting and African American History. Smith's research details events and fighters that indeed made and changed history in a period when Blacks were not recognized fully as citizens of the United States and abroad.

Kevin Smith does a good job in the layout of the events and as well as the fighter's lives. The amount of detail is a testament to his passionate research. Furthermore, Smith is honest with the reader and shares all potential occurrences to events that have been interpreted differently by others in previous works. His facts are straightforward, free of romantic rhetoric, but organized and presented in a manner that leaves the reader wanting more.

It's high time that the contributions of African-Americans to the early years of prizefighting recieved their due and to that end, Smith has done a succesful job. He's unearthed information about many hitherto unknown black fighters from the 19th Century together with evidence of a substantial amount of research to back up any assertions or claims.

However, the quality of writing is very pedestrian and Smith fails to conjure up an impression of what the experience of prizefighting was like in its time. His prose is leaden and unimaginative. After completion, you're hard pressed to remember any of the characters or their fights. Nothing in here has that "memorable encounter" quality and every incident seems to merge into another rendering everyone anonymous by the end.

Also, I think that if you are going to write a book about a certain demographic - African American fighters in the 19th Century in this instance - there has to be a reason and that reason must be to document the experience of what being a member of that demographic must have been like. It's also an excellent opportunity to describe the nature of a culture, in this case 19th Century England. In Black Genesis, we learn very little about that culture nor do we learn much about the black man's place in it. The book is little more than brief biographies of prize-fighters who might as well have been Irish.

Ultimately, a disappointing read that, despite being short, was a slog to get through.