More than a dozen previously uncollected boxing essays (nearly all done for The New Yorker) from the sure hand of Liebling, whose The Sweet Science (1955) tightly earned him a knockout reputation among fans of the fight game—and of elegant writing. Floyd Patterson, who went from amateur glory at the 1952 Olympics to the heavyweight championship of the world, is the main event here. Liebling covers no less than six of his matches: a tuneup with English opponent Brian London; three brawls with Ingemar Johansson (a Swede with a devastating right but little else); and two losing efforts against Sonny Liston. The undercard is in many cases a stellar proposition as well, featuring the likes of young Cassius Marcellus Clay (now known as Muhammad Ali), Dick Tiger, and ageless Archie Moore. And Liebling does not confine himself to headliners or big-time arenas. In chronicling a brutal sport he relishes without apology on its own unsentimental terms, the wayward pressman reports on bouts between no-name pugs in London's East End, Tunisia, and other unlikely venues. In allusive, digressive fashion, Liebling pays graceful tribute to professional boxing's roots as well as its often colorful seconds—cut-men, managers, promoters, sparring partners, trainers, etc. Before being counted out himself at age 59 in 1963, he offers a prescient, if discontinuous, account of how TV began to co-opt the fight game during the 1950's. A 15-rounder that goes the distance and leaves one to mourn the impossibility of a rematch.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1990
ISBN: 0865474958
Page Count: 258
Publisher: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1990
How Lyons (Fishing Widows, 1974, etc., and president of Lyons & Burford publishers) manages, year after year, to wrest fresh, hugely entertaining material from the world of fly-fishing is a mystery. But he does. Lyons likes to fish. He likes to fish long and hard, short and delicate. He likes to fish for all manner of quarry (though the brown trout is his downfall), and he will happily fish a spinning rod when the wicked, slender fly rod won't do. And when he's not streamside, he likes to fish in his head, read about fishing, paw through his fly boxes, dream of the honey holes. Lyons just slipped past the 60 mark, recently emerged from a hospital stay, and this collection of his articles and essays is a bit more reflective than his earlier books; the humor is still there, the wit sharp, but now he's taking a bead on why fishing has given him such pleasure, enthralled him so, made him, in a word, happy. In the long run, that joy may be ineffable, yet two aspects of his avocation continue to rise to the surface: Fishing makes him think, puzzle out a stretch of water, get intimate with the currents, eddies, and backwaters; and he deeply loves the context—not just the history and literature and paraphernalia, but even more the riverine environment, ``the things that led us here in the first place: simplicity, untrampled bogs and banks, sweet silences, and perfectly exquisite beauty.'' While Lyons would run screaming from the suggestion, there is more than just a touch of the graybeard's wisdom here; when he talks of Roderick Haig-Brown's books, their ``high-level of quiet instruction, inconspicuouly offered,'' the same could be applied to this book, teachings that shape the soul of the fisherman. For Lyons, fishing is a matter of the heart, and to fishing he has blissfully lost his.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-87113-628-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
``All good writing,'' F. Scott Fitzgerald asserted, is ``swimming underwater and holding your breath.'' The degree to which swimming serves as a metaphor for the act of creation, the ways in which the act of swimming itself liberates the imagination, and the manner in which swimming serves to remove us from the world of everyday concerns, are explored here in 46 stories, poems, and essays. Blossom, a poet herself, has unerring instincts for picking distinctive prose on the subject: The collection includes John Cheever's unsettling story ``The Swimmer''; frank, exact memoirs by the swimmers Diana Nyad and Annette Kellerman; and robust poems by Maxine Kumin (``400 Meter Freestyle''), Anne Sexton (``The Nude Swim''), and Mary Oliver (``The Swimmer''). A fresh idea, well executed.
Pub Date: May 23, 1996
ISBN: 0-88001-449-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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