On Boxing (Paperback)

by Joyce Carol Oates (Author) "The young welterweights are surely conscious of the chorus of jeers, boos, and catcalls in this great cavernous space reaching up into the cheap twenty-dollar..." (more)
Key Phrases: ring style, boxing history, title defense, Mike Tyson, Muhammad Ali, Joe Louis (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Yes, the same Joyce Carol Oates who packs one of the most lethal punches in American literature also happens to be an astute observer of the sweet science. Oates filters her knockout collection of essays through multifaceted prisms of art, history, sexuality, and politics to directly confront and explore boxing's physical and commercial brutality, but also the sense of human struggle and survival that's at boxing's purest core. "In the boxing ring," she writes, "man is in extremis, performing an atavistic rite ... for the mysterious solace of those who can participate only vicariously in such drama: the drama of life in the flesh. Boxing has become America's tragic theater." And from her ringside perspective, Oates, a true heavyweight of letters, analyzes the performances just brilliantly.

From Library Journal
A fight fan since her youth, novelist Oates follows in the tradition of boxing-loving writers like Hemingway and Mailer. In a slim volume expanded from a New York Times Magazine article, she candidly assays "The Sweet Science" for its spectacle, aesthetic elements, and its history from ancient Greece and Rome to today's ring dominated by callous promoters, casinos, and TV. Oates concedes boxing's brutality and often seamy side but finds positive merits as tragic theater. Good fare for fans and haters alike, especially those who have read Thomas Hauser's The Black Lights ( LJ 10/15/85) and Sam Toperoff's Sugar Ray Leonard and Other Noble Warriors ( LJ 11/1/86). Morey Berger, Monmouth Cty. Lib., Freehold, N.J.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 216 pages
• Publisher: Harper Perennial; Expanded edition (January 1, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880013850
• ISBN-13: 978-0880013857
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #670,329 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sugar Ray Oates, February 15, 2002

By	MICHAEL ACUNA (Southern California United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

The sport of Boxing, on the surface at least, does not automatically come to mind as obvious subject matter for the premier writing talents of Joyce Carol Oates; even though Ms. Oates certainly can get down and dirty with the best of them as in her "Man Crazy" or "Zombie."
But as Oates explains in her 1987 collection of essays (revised in 1994), "On Boxing":"No one whose interest began as mine did in childhood--as an offshot of my father's interest is likely to think of boxing as something else, a metaphor...Life is like boxing, in many respects. But boxing is only like boxing."
Oates is a boxing fan and a great writer and it was inevitable that these two facets of her life would converge.
"On Boxing" is really 3 separate essays: "On Boxing," "On Mike Tyson" and "The Cruelest Sport."
The first essay is so crammed full of fascinating, revelatory statements about the nature and function and the social and psychological nature of boxing that it is hard to pick out only a few to quote here. But I will try: "To enter the ring near-naked and to risk one's life is to make of one's audience voyeurs of a kind: boxing is so intimate. It is to ease out of sanity's consciousness and into another, difficult to name. It is to risk, and sometimes to realize, the agony of which "agon" (Greek, "contest") is the root."
In Oates view, the boxer brings more than his body to bear in the ring...he also brings his soul: "There are some boxers possessed of such remarkable intuition, such uncanny prescience, one would think they were somehow recalling their fights, not fighting them as we watch."
"On Boxing" the essay is also a boxing history lesson highlighting the careers of Jack Dempsey,Joe Louis, Muhammed Ali,Sugar Ray Leonard, Roberto Duran, etc.: their careers, their boxing styles, their defeats and in some cases their lives after the boxing ring: "the drama of life in the flesh. Boxing has become America's tragic theater."
The second essay, "On Mike Tyson," written in 1988 predates all of Tyson's legal troubles, court cases and incarceration. And so Oates, who had extensive access to Tyson, writes of his home,his dog and his friends in glowing terms.With Oates, Tyson is soft-spoken, courteous, sensitive, thoughtful and intospective. Things that in 2002 we do not normally associate with Mike Tyson. Never a pushover, Oates also quotes Tyson after his 1986 fight with the hapless Jesse Ferguson, whose nose was broken in the match, "I want to punch the bone into the brain...Tyson's language is as direct and brutal as his ring style, yet as more than one observer has noted, strangely disarming--there is no air of menace, or sadism, or boastfulness in what he says: only the truth."
Oates also speaks of a boxing match as a "catharsis" as Aristotle wrote: "the purging of pity and terror by the exercise of these emotions; the subliminal aftermath of classical tragedy."
The third essay, "The Cruelest Sport" details in part the physical toll of boxing. For example the 1980 Ali/Holmes fight in which Ali takes a tremendous beating from Holmes: in Sylvester Stallone's words, the fight was "like watching an autopsy on a man who's still alive." This as well as the Ali/Foreman fight in Zaire in 1974 began irreversible loss for Ali: progressive deterioration of Ali's kidneys, hands, reflexes and stamina.
"On Boxing" is Joyce Carol Oates's Ode to Boxing and by extension her father's interest in boxing, the smokiness of the arena, the smell of the hair oil and the hot dogs.And, even if you are not a boxing fan you cannot help but revel at the insights and amazing depth of feeling she brings to this subject and it's denizens.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Take It From a Fighter, April 8, 2004

By A Customer

I am still stunned that a person who has never been in the ring could have gained insights into boxing as powerful as the ones Oates pulled together in this book. And I'm grateful (and stunned) that a woman could be as sympathetic, not just to fighters, but to men and manhood, as Oates has managed to be in this book.

I am a serious amateur fighter and a sparring partner to the professional fighters I train with. I do gym work or road work five days a week with a former-professional trainer who was also a two-time NY Golden Gloves champion and junior Olympian. I spar Glovers and pros and I love it. I understand boxing and the love for boxing. The gist of my review here is this: After I read this book I realized I didn't understand my love for boxing -- where it comes from and what it all means and what it is I'm doing exactly -- as well as Joyce Carol Oates does. This woman is amazing to me. I've never read her fiction, but I will.

The first section of this book, the one in which Oates seemingly tries to take on boxing and what it means from every imaginable angle, is best. This is one of those very, very few books that made me fold down corners so that I can easily return to specific passages. I don't know if non-fighters will really understand this book, or if many fighters will ever bother to read it. But I'm damned glad I did and damned glad Ms. Oates is out there writing.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not what you might expect, November 23, 2002

By	a void (Stockholm, Sweden) - See all my reviews

I don't know what it is about Oates that makes so many, be they critics, fellow writers, or just average Joes and Janes, instinctively start spewing superlatives. Granted, some of what she's written is very good, but there are also those rather mediocre titles that seem to be praised to the skies for no other reason than that they're supposed to be, and that indeed appears to be the case with this little piece. It's amusing and it's informative, sure, but some kind of masterwork? Please.

`On boxing' is best when Oates focuses on the hard facts, like who did what where and when. That was not was I was looking for when I first got my hands on it, but it's still better - by far - than the parts where she tries to decipher the meaning of it all, which read like undergraduate assignments in pretentiousness. As is common with knowledgeable writers, Oates cannot help involving complex notions to say simple things. A boxer is not knocked out, he is knocked out of Time (yes, big `T'). The opponent is not the opponent, he is the Other (yes, big `O'). This is a practice I absolutely loathe. What we've got here is supposed to be a book about boxing, and if I wanted `Being and Nothingness' I'd have bought it. Don't get me wrong - certainly boxing could make for some profound commentary on the nature of humanity, which, I presume, is what she was aiming at (although I don't think she'd admit it). I'm just saying that with what she finally came up with you just keep wondering why she can't stick to the point, namely, that two people are trying to beat each other up.

Some people say this is the best that has ever been written on boxing. Obviously, they haven't looked very hard - even the Mailer quote on page 103 is enough to see why this is so.

Give it three stars for the moderately enjoyable journalism and, I almost forgot to say it, some beautiful photographs.