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Ralph Wiley Is The Greatest Sportswriter Of All Time...

One of the Best Books on Boxing Ever

The Pain Business

SERENITY A HARD HITTING NARRATIVE OF BOXING

Serenity: A Boxing Memoir
Ralph Wiley
Manufacturer: Henry Holt & Co
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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Customer Reviews:

Ralph Wiley Is The Greatest Sportswriter Of All Time..........2004-08-04

I was a great fan of Ralph Wiley's regular columns on ESPN's Page 2, and when he passed on (earlier this summer) I decided that it was well past time to get one of his books and see how he did in a longer form.

I'm glad I did. Wiley wrote a vivid description of the art and science of boxing; with every page offering insights that are provocative, disturbing, and important. It's as much about Wiley as it is about Leonard, Hearns, Hagler, Ali, and Tyson. That's not a problem as Wiley was an articulate, interesting, and experienced Black man.

Wiley relates that when he was a copyboy for the Oakland Trib, he would type "RALPH WILEY IS THE GREATEST SPORTSWRITER OF ALL TIME, BAR NONE" on the old IBM Selectric from time to time. It's a shame that so few sports fans seem to know him these days, especially now that he's gone. This great little book, which destroys boxing as completely as boxing seems to destroy its greatest talents, is quite an argument for Wiley's place in the pantheon of the greatest sports writers of all time.

If you enjoyed Wiley's columns, or his writing in SI, or his work on other subjects, OR if you have a passing interest in, or disgust over, or passion for boxing, you will enjoy this book. If you enjoy reading about one man's developing views on an activity that he at first approached with veneration and eventually came to see as horrific, you will enjoy this book. If you read Bill Simmons' columns, you will enjoy this book.

It's such shame that we don't have Wiley with us any more; and I'll miss him, but now that he's gone on maybe he's met Joe Louis at the gates and had that talk with him. We can only hope so.

One of the Best Books on Boxing Ever.......2004-06-20

this was where you truly could appreciate the Greatness of Ralph Wiley.He knew His Boxing&the way He broke down each subject matter is Classic.Boxing has had many Fighters but you know the Guys that you still debate&talk about many years later.Great takes on Ali,HitMan hearns,Sugar Ray Leonard,Mike Tyson&Everyone else mentioned.A Knockout of a Book from start to finish.

The Pain Business.......2002-12-27

Intellectuals have long had a fascination with boxing, an athletic contest reduced to its very essence-two semi-naked men trying to kill each other for the enjoyment of a crowd. That's about as stark as it gets. A long and varied list of literary heavyweights have fallen under boxing's spell-Hemingway, Mailer, Oates, Earley, etc., etc., etc. Ralph Wiley belongs up there with the best of them. The ideas he expresses in "Serenity" are meaty and delivered in a style that is both clear and artistic. Mr. Wiley can flat-out write and my goodness does he have an eye for detail and an ear for dialogue. His descriptions of knockout blows are downright poetic; one fighter "... went out like a broken light bulb"; another was struck so hard that the blow "... sent his eyes into the top of his head like snapped windowshades". The sights and sounds and smells of the gym all ring true in "Serenity", from the lowliest trainer ("...with a trainwreck of a yellowing smile") to the beatific Ali.

Mr. Wiley defines serenity as "...the inner peace which comes from doing something well enough to understand it". Boxers, per Wiley, can only acheive pugilistic serenity after they understand that pain, and maybe death, are part of the equation. Pain can not be avoided, no matter how skilled the fighter. So why do so many of them continue on, or return for more once they retire, even (or, perhaps, especially) the successful ones? Larry Holmes, one of the best, (whose latest comeback, at age 50, was against a 300 pound sideshow attraction named "Butterbean") is quoted that a fighter has "... gotta enjoy the ones you take just like the ones you give". Sugar Ray Leonard, like Holmes a wealthy man, made more comebacks than Marley's ghost and risked permanent blindness in the process. Bobby Chacon, another champion, "...smiles at the sight of his own blood". The title of a Gerald Earley essay-"I Only Like It Better When The Pain Comes"-is a direct quote from an early '80's crowd-pleasing Philadelphia middleweight Frank "The Animal" Fletcher. (Aside-Frank "The Animal" once fought James "Hard Rock" Green in a brutal, blood-gushing bout, a great nickname bout, where Mr. Fletcher's mother spurred her son on by leading the crowd in chants of "AN-I-MAL, AN-I-MAL, AN-I-MAL".) Do these otherwise intelligent men actually enjoy getting hit? Hardly. Mr. Wiley has delved deeply into the psyches of men who fight for pay searching for motive, for purpose, and he has succeeded. This is good stuff. "Serenity", like Evander Holyfield, is the Real Deal.

SERENITY A HARD HITTING NARRATIVE OF BOXING.......1998-07-06

Serenity, as Ralph Wiley tells it, is a state of mind that all fighters try to find. It's not easy, but then, writing a book about the most personal side of boxing - the fighters - isn't easy, either. Especially a good one. But Wiley has done that here. He includes himself a bit, which works, and uses a sharp, witty style that brings the fighters he writes about to life. Best are the chapters on Larry Holmes, and also a letter he writes to his son, Cole. Wiley is enormously gifted, and he will definitely be a writer to watch in the future.

Serenity: a Boxing Memoir A Search for the Boxer's Peace of Mind, from Joe Louis to Mike Tyson

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Serenity: a Boxing Memoir A Search for the Boxer's Peace of Mind, from Joe Louis to Mike Tyson
Ralph Wiley
Manufacturer: Henry Holt
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000JJVU56

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Film Culture Explorations of Cinema in Its Social Context
Ari Thomas
Manufacturer: Scarecrow Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: 0810815206

Book Description

"A marvelously simple, clear and practical guide to parenting in the first days, months and years!"-Diana Huss Green, Parents' Choice

"Wonderful ways to help parents and babies enrich each other's lives."-Sesame Street Parents

Each day with your baby brings new moments of caring, teaching, holding and growing through baby's first experiences.

Filled with magical ways to create and enhance those special everyday moments, 365 Games Smart Babies Play will help you celebrate each once-in-a-lifetime opportunity you and your baby share. Illustrated by children.

Customer Reviews:

Not quite 365 games.......2006-02-22

I agree with Mary. My baby is now almost 5 months old and I have just purchased this book. I don't need any advice on breastfeeding now after 5 months! There are some good games, and even a few good recipies and words to songs and rhymes we might have forgotten, but the title is indeed misleading.

misleading title.......2005-07-10

A more accurate title for this book would be "365 pieces of parenting advice." There are lots of nice thoughts and ideas on parenting here, but i already have several general parenting books. Each page is numbered, and some examples of the content are: #276 Weekend Escape (about taking a weekend off with your spouse), #34 Apple and Apricot Puree (a recipe for young eaters), #335 Diaper Rash, #67 Teeth Brushing. There are many non-activity pages like this. I did find fun passtimes for my baby and me, although most were ones that i'd already come up with on my own, and I had to weed through a lot of general parenting content to find them. Colored ice cubes in the bathtub was an original idea which I will try out. This is a nice book, just don't expect to find 365 actual games and activities.

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Beyond the Summit: Setting and Surpassing Extraordinary Business Goals

Can Change Your Thinking

Powerful, challenging, inspiring

Fantastic

A Refreshing Read

Beyond the Summit: Setting and Surpassing Extraordinary Business Goals
Todd Skinner
Manufacturer: Portfolio Hardcover
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover

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ASIN: 159184004X
Release Date: 2003-10-23

Book Description

World-class rock climber Todd Skinner is also one of today's most sought-after motivational speakers for business audiences. Whenever he describes his history-making sixty-day free climb of the 20,500-foot Trango Tower in the Karakoram Himalayas (shown on the jacket), people are in awe of his stamina, skill, ambition, and determination. They are also eager to apply his lessons in their professional and personal lives.

Skinner argues that everyone has a mountain to climb, whether it's meeting your annual sales target or launching a new product or getting your department to improve its teamwork. And he stresses that you should set your goals even higher than you normally would, and constantly look beyond the current summit to the next one. For instance, instead of aiming for 10 percent revenue growth, go after a seemingly impossible 50 percent target, and then think of new ways to get there.

In both rock climbing and business, you must define your exact mission, assemble the right team, make the critical transition from preparation to action, have courage when crossing difficult terrain, and weather the storms well. Skinner offers fresh insights into all of these topics and explains principles such as:
* how you think is more important than what you know
* pick teammates for what they will do, not what they have already done
* make decisions in answer to the mountain
* fall toward the summit
* see each challenge as part of a bigger picture, your lifelong ascent

Beyond the Summit presents fresh and inspiring advice on leadership, teamwork, and decision-making skills, combined with an epic adventure tale.

Customer Reviews:

Beyond the Summit: Setting and Surpassing Extraordinary Business Goals.......2007-02-22

I have no interest whatsoever in mountain climbing! Yet, I was fascinated with this "cliff hanger!" Most importantly, I had much to learn from it. The lessons I learned from Mr. Skinner's book about mountain climbing are equally relavant to obtaining any life goal, from raising good children to writing a book. Everyone can benefit from this read.

Can Change Your Thinking.......2004-04-15

Todd Skinner has written a book that invites you to change how you think about challenges and obstacles. Especially pertinent were his specifics such as considering "measuring your progress from where you are to the summit" instead of where you began. There are several "aha" moments to be found in Beyond the Summit that do not ask you to understand a complex model of management or leadership, that are quite profound and immediately useful. Practical and inspirational.

Powerful, challenging, inspiring.......2004-03-29

Is there a better metaphor for success in your endeavors than mountain climbing? So if you want the ultimate in success why not study the ultimate in mountain climbing. The lessons that Todd Skinner brings down from the summit are striking, challenging and forcefully introspective. Having read "Beyond the Summit" I found myself frequently putting the book down long enough to ask myself where I might find my personal 'first ascension.' An incredible book with a powerful story and life-changing lessons.

Fantastic.......2004-01-23

Having just heard Todd speak, I must say, he is by far one of the most influential people I have ever heard in person.

A Refreshing Read.......2004-01-20

I'm one of the lucky people who have heard Todd Skinner present "Beyond the Summit." I wondered how his presentation would translate into written form. What I found when I read "Beyond the Summit," was an elegant, down to earth, kinda zen-like model on how to fully live a life - or conduct a business ascent. I found the philosophy inspiring and practical and the story as fascinating as the first time I heard it. This will be a book that I read at the beginning of each year to keep me on the right path.

Book Description

This is the case Eliot Ness didn't solve.

During the Depression, the area known as Kingsbury Run on Cleveland's near East Side was filled with the unemployed and homeless who set up shantytowns. It was also the site where the gruesome remains of some of the Torso Killer's victims were found. "In the Wake of the Butcher" presents the history of these unsolved serial killings in exhaustive detail. Sifting through hundreds of original documents, police files (including the previously unseen files of the case's chief investigator Peter Merylo)and coroner's reports, and conducting interviews with surviving primary sources, Badal pieces together the chain of murders and the investigation that ultimately came up short. Illustrated with maps, rare crime scene and morgue photographs, and newspaper photos, "In the Wake of the Butcher" presents its compelling case and brings Cleveland's infamous Torso Murders back into the spotlight.

Customer Reviews:

A grisly Cleveland time capsule.......2007-05-22

Early on in this masterpiece of urban history and crime journalism, James Badal compares Cleveland's Butcher of Kingsbury Run's four-year (at least) career with that of Jack the Ripper, and concludes that the same two ingredients guarantee continued fascination with both cases: atrocious crimes and a perp who is never identified. Does Badal ever demonstrate these with regard to the Butcher! This book would read like fiction if we didn't have Badal's meticulous notes to back it all up. What's more, there is a vivid sense of what it was like to have this slaughter going on in the Great Depression, in some of Cleveland's poorest and most wretched shanty-towns. At the time my family lived in Tremont, just over the river and up the hill from the killing grounds, and now I know one story they didn't pass on to the kids. Badal has done a superb job here. It's horrible and it's convincing.

Careful, thorough research yields inconsistent results.......2007-05-08

I am really torn about this book.

On the one hand, it is the only comprehensive work available that tells this important story in the history of an American city, a story filled with political intrigue, social importance, and of course human tragedy.

On the other hand, it is a book that really does not know what it wants to be. Is it a scholarly study? If so, the political and social significance of the Butcher's rampage are not explored in any meaningful way. Is it a true crime re-enactment? While the author painstakingly re-enacts the known events to the smallest details, the language and presentation rob them of much of the excitement causing a fascinating story to become stale and lifeless at times.

So, in short I do recommend this book despite its short-comings because of the subject matter and the fact that the author has done us the service of providing solid research using the best known sources. However, I actually enjoyed reading the short Crime Library article on the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run more than this book.

Excellent and Riveting! Not for the Squeamish!.......2007-04-15

Look if you get easily squeamish or turned off by the horror of the torso murders in Cleveland also known as the Kingsbury Run Murders, don't read or look at this book. But if you are like me, I like reading true crime no matter how disgusting or shocking as it is. I'm glad the author does use real photos that are quite shocking to those who get squeamish. The writing is excellent because it's detailed and thorough. I like true crime writers who allow us to know everything that the police or authorities know of the crimes. These crimes not only were more similar to the Jack the Ripper case in London but they were far worse because they were more victims in this case that were not as desirable as the Black Dahlia or as interesting as Jack the Ripper. There were victims but they were likely poor, desperate, vagrants, transients, blue collar workers, people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time. We still don't know who did these crimes and we'll never really know. DNA and forensics paled back then. I felt bad for Elliot Ness who took charge but never solved the crimes as did other police officers who fought to find this monster who enjoyed decaptitating his victims while they were still alive. It must have been a butcher obsessed with people as well as animals. This book is well-worth the purchase because of all the details. I'm sure there were a lot more but it would be too technical etc. This book by James Jessen Badal who I don't recall as being a true crime author has done a fantastic and brilliant job in his first true crime book about the Cleveland's Kingsbury Run murders. The pictures are spread out rather than in certain pages in the book. Anyway, I hope he writes about other true crime cases in the Cleveland area. Maybe the Sam Sheppard case. Just a suggestion!

Case Closed.......2005-09-19

When Storytellers Media Group decided to produce a true crime series of documentaries - beginning with Ohio's own Torso Murders - we were pleasantly surprised to find that the author of the definitive study on the subject lived right here in Cleveland.

It was Jim Badal's carefully measured narrative that became the on-screen voice for The Fourteenth Victim - Eliot Ness and the Torso Murders, and which has since lent itself to our newest collaboration on the sad tale of missing child Beverly Potts; his book about Beverly is entitled Twilight of Innocence, and the resulting documentary is called Dusk & Shadow.

Unlike some historical true crime studies, Jim does not talk down to his readers and hand them a solution in either book. Instead, he offers the evidence and lets the reader decide - but the hint Badal drops is the size of a late-50s Buick, and it becomes all too clear who even Eliot Ness thought was the Mad Butcher of Kingsbury Run. I won't spoil it for you.

While I had cut my teeth on Ann Rule true crime books, it's Jim Badal's roman noir style of writing he employs for In the Wake of the Butcher - Cleveland's Torso Murders that seems to bring the genre from its solid emotional grounding that informs Rule's books and into a scholarly literary form. At the same time, though, Jim writes in a spare prose that reads like more like a desperate Jim Thompson novel where tragedy unfolds inexorably. You do not want to read Butcher after dark - or, if you're anything like me, perhaps you do!

From the author, James Badal - Der Drache erwacht.......2005-09-13

I appreciate Mr. Beveridge taking the time to "review" my book "In the Wake of the Butcher." I must point out, however, that his allegation that I "ultimately dismiss" Dr. Francis Edward Sweeney as the prime candidate in the series of murder-dismemberments is simply not true. No one who read my book carefully could possibly come to that conculsion. Of course, with over 1,500 online reviews to his credit, Mr. Beveridge probably has precious little time for any sort of reading, careful or otherwise.

Book Description

Analyzes the benefits and drawbacks of new technologies in landmine detection and offers solutions for improving and speeding up the process.

Book Description

In this collective biography, Rhonda Y. Williams takes us behind, and beyond, politically expedient labels to provide an incisive and intimate portrait of poor black women in urban America. Drawing on dozens of interviews, Williams challenges the notion that low-income housing was a resounding failure that doomed three consecutive generations of post-war Americans to entrenched poverty. Instead, she recovers a history of grass-roots activism, of political awakening, and of class mobility, all facilitated by the creation of affordable public housing. The stereotyping of black women, especially mothers, has obscured a complicated and nuanced reality too often warped by the political agendas of both the left and the right, and has prevented an accurate understanding of the successes and failures of government anti-poverty policy.

Customer Reviews:

Placing Black Women at the Center of Urban History.......2005-01-26

In this landmark case study, historian Rhonda Y. Williams redefines postwar urban history by placing black women's struggles at the center of an engaging and richly detailed narrative. Specifically, Williams focuses on the housing activism of poor black women in Baltimore to craft a story that expands the contours of the black freedom movement. By detailing the activism of low income women around everyday issues of "housing, food, clothing, and daily life in community spaces"--what the author describes as "activism at the point of consumption--The Politics of Public Housing unveils a hidden history of political struggle. Ultimately, this book chronicles the lives and heroic activism of tenants, community organizers, and single mothers who demanded dignity instead of demonization and held onto their self-respect in the face of horrible living conditions, insensitive bureacrats, and stigmas against pubic housing residents that relegated them to the political margins. Rhonda Y. Williams has successfully rescued these women's stories from history's dustbin and in the process produced a groundbreaking work of history. Readers interested in African-American, women's, urban, and working class history will enjoy this book.

The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality.(Book Review): An article from: Journal of Social History

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The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality.(Book Review): An article from: Journal of Social History
Adina Back
Manufacturer: Journal of Social History
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

General | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Journal of Social History, published by Thomson Gale on December 22, 2005. The length of the article is 1298 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality.(Book Review)
Author: Adina Back
Publication: Journal of Social History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: December 22, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 39 Issue: 2 Page: 581(4)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality.(Book Review): An article from: Journal of Southern History

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The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality.(Book Review): An article from: Journal of Southern History
Omar H. Ali
Manufacturer: Thomson Gale
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital

General | Politics | Nonfiction | Subjects | Books

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Journal of Southern History, published by Thomson Gale on November 1, 2005. The length of the article is 588 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality.(Book Review)
Author: Omar H. Ali
Publication: Journal of Southern History (Magazine/Journal)
Date: November 1, 2005
Publisher: Thomson Gale
Volume: 71 Issue: 4 Page: 951(2)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

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