Customer Reviews

Joe Louis, My Life

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Besides the entertaining account of Louis' life, this book includes some great anecdotes about American life in the middle of the 20th century, especially African American society.

Among the celebrities who merit a few pages are Lena Horne (who had an affair with Louis) and Jackie Robinson (Louis claims he helped integrate the Armed Service baseball teams). The descriptions of Harlem at its peak are terrific.

Despite all the revelations of infidelity and his terrible money sense, Louis comes across as warm and likeable. The descriptions of boxing matches are readable even to a non-sports fan, although at some points they tend to blur together. Lots of great pictures, too.

Oh, the "Brown Bomber"; that champ ranks among the greatest of all time.
The time I spent reading Joe Louis' autobiography was fascinating. Everything about the book depicted that gentleness that was his off-ring trademark. Yes, Color-Bar affected him like any other Black person of his generation, but he took it along in his strides. It is only the grace of God that transformed this poor sharecropper's son into one of the most famous persons of the 20th Century.
His record of 12-year reign as a champion, backed-up by an equally outstanding 25 title defences is still a burning candle that no heavyweight has been able to extinguish. I am only saddened by the fact that (American) racism (in those days, and to some extent today) did its best to hinder those credentials; as well as the joy that the post-ring gentleman deserved. May his soul Rest In Peace!

This book came out two years before the Bomber died,and it was real good.I always remember hearing my parents talking about how they would hear Joe Louis fights on the radio,and how proud they felt.To this day they speak highly of him.Here, He is candid on his life,including his father's mental illness,women,boxing,financial challenges,marriages,etc.He don't leave nothing out. And I have enjoyed it then and now. I had some misconceptions about him, and was glad he cleared them up. Great for the generations that knew nothing about Joe, and those that did and wish to remember.

This is Joe Louis' life told by him simply and in unvarnished language - almost as if dictated into a tape recorder. It is an easy speed-read.

As a simply boy from the red clay of Alabama, Louis lived a poor but virtually trouble-free life in the love and company of a close-knit family of a stepfather, mother and sixteen brothers and sisters. Until boxing, his only ambition in life was to become a gentleman farmer. His "real" father, unable to hack the harsh life of carving out an existence on 120 acres in the red clay of Alabama as a sharecropper, ended up in the insane asylum. Periodically he would escape and rejoin the family - that is, until his mom eventually got tired of trying to raise eight kids alone and remarried Patrick Brooks, who also had eight kids.

During the early part of the Depression years, Louis' parents decided to give up sharecropping and move to Detroit where they would have better opportunities and regular pay working for the Ford motor company. Once there, Louis, who stuttered badly, "never took to" regular school because he was teased and was a poor student. Eventually he was put into a vocational training school where he learned cabinetmaking. But his mom saw this as a dead-end for him and insisted that he also take up the violin. With his six foot two, 200-pound frame, toting a violin around the streets of Detroit's "black bottom," Louis was egging for trouble. Predictably, he ended up wrapping the violin around the head of one of his tormentors and was hustled into Brewster's East side gym by Golden Gloves holder Thurston McKinney. Once there, Joe makes the point that when he entered the gym, as well as throughout his boxing career, there was nothing at all natural about his boxing abilities or talents. He learned his craft the hard way: by listening, training and working hard for every inch of what he learned and accomplished. In fact his early amateur fights were so discouraging that for a six-month stretch he actually gave up boxing and went back to work for Ford. However, with his parents support, he eventually returned to the ring.

In judging what made Louis so successful (where many other heavyweights had failed), luck played an important role: Perhaps much greater than any innate talent he may have had, was finding an honest and talented trainer, manager -- and eventually, and equally talented and honest promoter, which for black fighters of that day, was much more difficult. With this fortuitous team, Louis continued to hone his skills and slowly worked his way up the heavyweight ladder, culminating in the first non-title bout with Primo Carnera and then on to the famous two bouts with Max Schmeling. Louis' narration of the two Schmeling fights alone is worth the price of the book.

As Louis tells it, in the first Schmeling fight, he went into the ring underprepared, cocky and got caught early in the second round with a vicious right to his jaw, which he never quite recovered from. The greatest pain however was the injury to his ego and in letting his family, friends and his race down. In the second fight, he went in focused and only with bad intentions and revenge in his heart: to do harm to Schmeling's Nazi soul. Although later in life they eventually became friends, it was Schmeling's ego that never quite recovered from the second fight.

The rest of the book is unusually predictable and formulaic in that it is a clinical narration of the "Brown Bomber's" fights, both noteworthy one's (such as with Billy Conn, and his toughest fight of all, that with the IRS), and many, many not so noteworthy ones as he traveled around boxing's version of the Chitlin circuit.

His later life, as it "petered down" to the life of a typical "has been" athlete, was predictably tragic: bravado about sexual conquests, several failed marriages, mindless squandering of his fortune, and his own mental problems. However, for us incurable pugilist fans, this book is like listening to the master and thus is an historical must. Three stars.