Book Reviews: Boxing: A Cultural History
Another round of good reviews has poured in for Kasia Boddy's Boxing: A Cultural History. First up is a short but positive review in the June 19th issue of The Economist. The reviewer notes that "[Boddy] provides much merriment along the way as she explores the ways professional fighters excite the imagination of writers, artists and intellectuals."
Right behind it was a praise-filled review in the June 20th issue of The Times of London. The Times reviewer declared
The merit of Kasia Boddy's meticulously researched and deeply intelligent examination of boxing through the ages is that it refuses to take the pop historian's route of lazy simplification. The political and moral ambiguity of the fights that have played such a seminal role in shaping human consciousness are chronicled in all their rich and equivocal detail. . . . Her volume is one of the most intelligent sporting books of recent times.
The June 23rd review in the Australian paper The Age was a little more lukewarm, but the reviewer notes
Kasia Boddy is no faint-heart. She appears to have tracked down every last reference to boxing in prose, poetry, painting, sculpture, film and video. . . . As Boddy shows at scholarly length, in American books and plays and paintings and films, boxing came to carry a heavy symbolic freight. The gloves and the ring stood for pride and courage, sacrifice and nobility, salvation and redemption. They also stood for corruption, greed, betrayal, pain and death. No other sport - indeed, perhaps no other human activity - has been so fraught with meaning.
Read the full review in The Economist
Read the complete Times review
Read the full review in The Age
Learn more about Boxing: A Cultural History, newly published by Reaktion Books