Sparring with Hemingway
And Other Legends of the Fight Game
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Schulberg goes toe to toe with his lifelong passion in this collection of his greatest writings on boxing
“As much as I love boxing, I hate it.” So begins screenwriter, novelist, and journalist Budd Schulberg’s collection of essays on the sweet science of bruising, a sport that fueled his literary ambitions and unsettled his conscience from a young age. He gives riveting accounts of classic bouts, such as Rocky Marciano–Archie Moore, Muhammad Ali–George Foreman, and Marvin Hagler–Thomas Hearns. Yet these essays also offer insight into the sport’s sociological significance from a man who covered its highlights and corruption-marred lowlights for decades. Sparring with Hemingway stands as the unparalleled history of boxing’s place in American culture throughout the twentieth century. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Budd Schulberg including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Schulberg, whose novel The Harder They Fall was misinterpreted as an attack on boxing, is nonetheless of two minds about the sport, as this collection of essays and reportage from 1954 to 1994 demonstrates. ``As much as I love boxing, I hate it,'' he confesses, asserting at one point that the Sweet Science is not dehumanizing and elsewhere castigating it as ``the slum of sports.'' There are two fine pieces here, the first about Hemingway, the second about Muhammad Ali. While he proclaims his near reverence for Hemingway as a writer, he gives the impression that Papa was a thoroughly obnoxious human being with an aggressively proprietary attitude toward anything or anyone that interested him. And Schulberg's view of Ali, the man who lived up to his own billing as a child of the 1960s, ``the fifth Beatle,'' is a perceptive analysis. But excellent as the essays are, the reportage that fills out the book is pedestrian.
