Customer Reviews

Boxing: A Cultural History

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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.

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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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".