Dempsey


Book Description

“To millions there has never a fighter like Jack Dempsey, and there never will be again.” Originally published in 1960, this is the autobiography from boxing heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey himself, as told to U.S. sports writers Bob Considine and Bill Slocum.




How To Box


Book Description

Joe Louis's How to Box will teach you to deliver a knockout punch, step by step. The legendary heavyweight champion thoroughly covers all aspects of boxing in this well-written, definitive guide. Louis's sense of fair play, good sportsmanship, and dedicated training will both instruct and inspire. Beginning with mental discipline, Louis moves through basic training and equipment to stance, punching, and footwork, followed by working with a punching bag, methods of training, and learning various strategic punches. Generously illustrated with diagrams and action photos, here is everything needed to learn how to excel in the ring. One of the greatest boxers of all time, Joe Louis was in the ring before and during World War II. Some of his famous bouts became symbolic of the larger global conflict at hand; because of this he was the first Black American to be widely recognized as a national hero, playing a key role in the eventual integration of professional sports. Also included in this edition are listings of Louis's Heavyweight Title Defenses and championships in every weight class. How To Box concisely presents the best boxing techniques along with a slice of sporting history. Whether you are a sports fan, want a great workout, or plan to competitively enter the ring one day, this book by the man who famously said, "You can run, but you can't hide," is must reading.




Championship Fighting


Book Description

"Jack Dempsey, one of the greatest and most popular boxers of all time, reveals the techniques behind his unparalleled success in the ring. Straightforward and with detailed illustrations, Championship Boxing instructs the reader in the theory, training, and application of powerful punching, aggressive defense, proper stance, feinting, and footwork. The methods Dempsey reveals will prove useful to both amateurs and professionals"--Page 4 of cover.




Jack Dempsey


Book Description

A biography of Jack Dempsey, Heavyweight Champion of the World from 1919-1926.




Nonpareil Jack Dempsey


Book Description

Hall of Fame middleweight prizefighter John Edward Kelly, better known as Nonpareil Jack Dempsey, was one of the most popular athletes in the United States during the late 19th century. To many observers, Dempsey is one of the greatest pound-for-pound fighters in ring history. Inside the ropes, he was fearless, poised, quick, agile, and had terrific punching power with both hands. His story is rich--full of amazing highs and terrible lows. He was a poor immigrant Irish boy who scaled great heights to become one of this nation's first sports celebrities. He became a household name, wealthy and popular. But much too soon, it all came crashing down. His violent profession, alcoholism, mental illness, and tuberculosis left little to recognize of the valiant hero of so many battles.




How to Fight Tough


Book Description

A very rare WWII combative, "How to Fight Tough", has been reprinted and is now available! This reprint is a faithful reproduction of the original with original formatting and graphics and digitally-enhanced photographs. At the outset of World War II, boxing heavyweight champion Jack Dempsey was appointed as a lieutenant in the U.S. Coast Guard and given the job of director of physical fitness. His orders: "Make 'em tough!" His task: to teach rookie Coast Guardsmen how to fight down and dirty in the face of the very real threat of enemy troops infiltrating American shores. Get in the ring with "the Manassa Mauler" as he gives 18 fully illustrated lessons in the art of bashing and brawling on the battlefield, including Subduing an Armed Enemy, The Unbreakable Strangle, Beating the Punch, Hammering Your Way Out of a Stranglehold, The Belt Trick, Fooling the Smart Knife Man, Turning the Tables with a Bayonet and Breaking a Standoff. All students of nasty close-quarters combat in the tradition of Sykes, Fairbairn, Applegate and other giants of the World War II era will thoroughly enjoy this fascinating piece of history. "How to Fight Tough," written by the toughest man in America, is a simple, clear and complete illustrated text book on how to deal with the enemy-and subdue him-in any possible emergency.




A Flame of Pure Fire


Book Description

Jack Dempsey was perfectly suited to the time in which he fought, the time when the United States first felt the throb of its own overwhelming power. For eight years and two months after World War I, Dempsey, with his fierce good looks and matchless dedication to the kill, was heavyweight champion of the world. A Flame of Pure Fire is the extraordinary story of a man and a country growing to maturity in a blaze of strength and exuberance that nearly burned them to ash. Hobo, roughneck, fighter, lover, millionaire, movie star, and, finally, a gentleman of rare generosity and sincerity, Dempsey embodied an America grappling with the confusing demands of preeminence. Dempsey lived a life that touched every part of the American experience in the first half of the twentieth century. Roger Kahn, one of our preeminent writers about the human side of sport, has found in Dempsey a subject that matches his own manifold talents. A friend of Dempsey's and an insightful observer of the ways in which sport can measure a society's evolution, Kahn reaches a new and exciting stage in his acclaimed career with this book. In the story of a man John Lardner called "a flame of pure fire, at last a hero," Roger Kahn finds the heart of America.




Guernica


Book Description

The remarkable story of the famous painting by Picasso and its diverse meanings from its conception to the present day 'Enthralling ... This is high-action drama, told like the rest within a huge frame of reference, theme interlocked with theme ... A painting which began its life within a particular political context has emerged as a universal statement on the ever-present horror and suffering of war. Van Hensbergen has treated an extraordinary subject admirably' Evening Standard Of all the great paintings in the world, Picasso's Guernica has had a more direct impact on our consciousness than perhaps any other. In this absorbing and revealing book, Gijs van Hensbergen tells the story of this masterpiece. Starting with its origin in the destruction of the Basque town of Gernika in the Spanish Civil War, the painting is then used as a weapon in the propaganda battle against Fascism. Later it becomes the nucleus of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the detonator for the Big Bang of Abstract Expressionism in the late 1940s. This tale of passion and politics shows the transformation of this work of art into an icon of many meanings, up to its long contested but eventually triumphant return to Spain in 1981.




Michigan and the Civil War


Book Description

Michigan undertook a rapid and robust response to Lincoln's call to arms during the Civil War and in many of its great battles. Read the much overlooked history in this volume. With lively narration, telling anecdotes, and vivid battlefield accounts, Michigan and the Civil War tells the story as never before of Michigan's heroic contributions to saving the Union. Beginning with Michigan's antebellum period and anti-slavery heritage, the book proceeds through Michigan's rapid response to President Lincoln's call to arms, its participation in each of the War's greatest battles, portrayal of its most interesting personalities, and the concluding triumph as Custer corners Lee at Appomattox and the 4th Michigan Cavalry apprehends the fleeing Jeff Davis. Based on thorough and up-to-date research, the result is surprising in its breadth, sometimes awe-inspiring, and always a revelation given how contributions by the Great Lake State in the Civil War are too often overlooked, even by its own citizens.




Tunney


Book Description

Among the legendary athletes of the 1920s, the unquestioned halcyon days of sports, stands Gene Tunney, the boxer who upset Jack Dempsey in spectacular fashion, notched a 77—1 record as a prizefighter, and later avenged his sole setback (to a fearless and highly unorthodox fighter named Harry Greb). Yet within a few years of retiring from the ring, Tunney willingly receded into the background, renouncing the image of jock celebrity that became the stock in trade of so many of his contemporaries. To this day, Gene Tunney’s name is most often recognized only in conjunction with his epic “long count” second bout with Dempsey. In Tunney, the veteran journalist and author Jack Cavanaugh gives an account of the incomparable sporting milieu of the Roaring Twenties, centered around Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey, the gladiators whose two titanic clashes transfixed a nation. Cavanaugh traces Tunney’s life and career, taking us from the mean streets of Tunney’s native Greenwich Village to the Greenwich, Connecticut, home of his only love, the heiress Polly Lauder; from Parris Island to Yale University; from Tunney learning fisticuffs as a skinny kid at the knee of his longshoreman father to his reign atop boxing’s glamorous heavyweight division. Gene Tunney defied easy categorization, as a fighter and as a person. He was a sex symbol, a master of defensive boxing strategy, and the possessor of a powerful, and occasionally showy, intellect–qualities that prompted the great sportswriters of the golden age of sports to portray Tunney as “aloof.” This intelligence would later serve him well in the corporate world, as CEO of several major companies and as a patron of the arts. And while the public craved reports of bad blood between Tunney and Dempsey, the pair were, in reality, respectful ring adversaries who in retirement grew to share a sincere lifelong friendship–with Dempsey even stumping for Tunney’s son, John, during the younger Tunney’s successful run for Congress. Tunney offers a unique perspective on sports, celebrity, and popular culture in the 1920s. But more than an exciting and insightful real-life tale, replete with heads of state, irrepressible showmen, mobsters, Hollywood luminaries, and the cream of New York society, Tunney is an irresistible story of an American underdog who forever changed the way fans look at their heroes.