hucka billy

Here's a handsome book, On Boxing, by Joyce Carol Oates, 118 pp. "Acknowledgments" (a ten-item bibliography; there are several additional useful citations in the easily-scanned text), many fine b & w photos by John Ranard, of gym, locker-room and ring scenes. The text is worked up from Oates' articles in the New York Times Magazine June 16, 1985 and the Ontario Review Fall/Winter 1986. Nice cover photo of champ in white robe exultant, big- eyed author head shot on …

…a BAR man in Korea who decided to stay behind on a fallback maneuver, kill a lot of dinks and die, and unfortunately woke up the next morning alive behind a pile of dead people. Boxers and veterans and writers: most adults have to work for a living at punishing jobs, and most authors don't, and I think there will always be books of problematic charm coming out of these facts of life. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ **Bibliography**