"Within these writings, [Boxiana; or Sketches of Ancient and Modern Pugilism, Pierce] Egan coined the phrase 'The Sweet Science [of Bruising]' this went on to become the quite familiar 'Sweet Science' we know of today at the hands of another boxing writer, AJ Liebling, who paid much homage to Egan. So much so, in fact, that Liebling titled his own (and first) collection of boxing articles The Sweet Science. Seeing as I own a copy of that, look for a review of it coming fairly soon."
- Kaplowitz Media. Boxiana
Fairly soon enough, I now have this announcement to make: I will be deep-diving AJ Liebling's aforementioned "The Sweet Science." I will be doing this to the tune of a (perhaps) six-part KM. mini-series wherein I will share my thoughts as to each group of essays within this collection. These include: Introduction, The Big Fellows, The Melting Middleweight, The Big Fellows Again, Other Fronts, and Ahab and Nemesis. Again, these are headers each consisting of one-to-nine essays. The intro is, of course, just an intro, but well-worth looking at.
These installments will be published to this Kaplowitz Media. blog on a weekly basis--that's the goal, anyway. These projects often tell you (me) their schedule instead of the other way around. I just might have to split Other Fronts (9 essays) into two installments, say, as I peruse the book in-between typing this out. I can definitively tell you the start week, however, and I will. That will be the week of September 19th. Next week, then. I am as excited as you are to see how this all plays out. It does begin to take on the tone of a lot.
Finally, a bit about the author and this book (Thanks to Wikipedia). Liebling was born a wealthy Manhattanite in 1904. In 1920 he attended Dartmouth College and later Columbia University, where he studied journalism. After this, he was fired from the New York Times sports department, and in 1926 he was sent off by his father to attend Sorbonne, The University of Paris. After a bit more than a year, he returned to NY and began his lengthy association with The New Yorker which lasted until his 1963 death.
He was a WWII correspondent in-between writing about boxing, horseracing, and food (the main thing he studied in France, apparently). He wrote some twenty books, mainly-to-mostly if not predominantly, or all collections of his essays and articles. Most pertinent perhaps to our purposes, in 1995 the Boxing Writers Association of America introduced an award in his honor. Apropos of nothing, he gave Chicago its nickname of the "Second City."
As to this book, in 2002 Sports Illustrated named it their number one sports book of all time. The Sweet Science is pulled from his New Yorker writings and was first published as a collection in 1956 by The Viking Press. As such it features legendary names the likes of Rocky Marciano, Joe Louis, and Sugar Ray Robinson. The edition I'll be working from is Northpoint Press, 2004. It is a paperback edition because dad couldn't afford to send me to Sorbonne and I've yet to much better my lot.
::: very :::