Metro Detroit Boxing


Book Description

Boxing seemed to spring up in Detroit as early as 1900: heavyweight champ Jim Jeffries and future heavyweight champ Tommy Burns fought that year. With the emergence of Joe Louis in the 1930s and Thomas Mearns in the late 1970s, Motown enjoyed surges of interest in the sport. At the dawn of a new millenium, the presence of three casinos has given the sport another revival of interest in the city. Metro Detroit Boxing showcases over 180 photographs that reveal not only the personalities who have enlivened the sport in the Detroit area, but also the places in which boxers, trainers, managers, and promoters fought, trained, lived, worked, and recreated. Photographs include where Joe Louis went to school, trained, and fought. Various boxing celebrities, including Muhammad Ali, are caught for the camera, socializing with eminent politicians and other figures of the day.




A Fist for Joe Louis and Me


Book Description

2020-2021 Keystone to Reading Elementary Book Award List Gordy and his family live in Detroit, Michigan, the heart of the United States automobile industry. Every night after coming home from work at one of the plants, Gordy's father teaches him how to box. Their hero is the famous American boxer Joe Louis, who grew up in Detroit. But the Great Depression has come down hard on the economy. Detroit's auto industry is affected and thousands of people lose their jobs, including Gordy's father. When his mother takes on work with a Jewish tailor, Gordy becomes friends with Ira, the tailor's son, bonding over their shared interest in boxing and Joe Louis. As the boys' friendship grows, Gordy feels protective of Ira, wanting to help the new boy fit in. At the same time, America is gearing up for the rematch between Joe Louis and the German boxer, Max Schmeling. For many Americans this fight is about good versus evil (US against Nazi Germany). Against the backdrop of the 1938 Fight of the Century, a young boy learns what it means to make a stand for a friend.




Sweet Thunder


Book Description

Sugar Ray Robinson was one of the most iconic figures in sports and possibly the greatest boxer of all time. His legendary career spanned nearly 26 years, including his titles as the middleweight and welterweight champion of the world and close to 200 professional bouts. This illuminating biography grounds the spectacular story of Robinson's rise to greatness within the context of the fighter's life and times. Born Walker Smith Jr. in 1921, Robinson's early childhood was marked by the seething racial tensions and explosive race riots that infected the Midwest throughout the 1920s and 1930s. After his mother moved their family to Harlem, he came of age in the post-Renaissance years. Recounting his local and national fame, this deeply researched and honest account depicts Robinson as an eccentric and glamorous--yet powerful and controversial--celebrity, athlete, and cultural symbol. From Robinson's gruesome six-bout war with Jake "Raging Bull" LaMotta and his lethal meeting with Jimmy Doyle to his Harlem nightclub years and thwarted showbiz dreams, Haygood brings the champion's story to life.




Detroit ...


Book Description




The Statues and Legacies of Combat Athletes in the Americas


Book Description

The violence of combat sports left a mark on how fans and communities remembered athletes. As individual endeavors, combat sports have often produced more detailed, emotionally poignant, and deeply personal stories of triumph than those associated with team sports. Commemorative statues to combat athletes are therefore unique as historical markers and sites of memory. These statues tell remarkable stories of the athletes themselves, but also the people and communities that planned and built them, the cities and towns that memorialized them, the fans who followed them, and the evolution of memory and place in the decades that followed their inauguration. Edited by C. Nathan Hatton and David M. K. Sheinin, The Statues and Legacies of Combat Athletes in the Americas brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars from across North America to interrogate the intimate and layered meanings attached to these monuments to the lives and legacies of combat athletes.




Fight Sports and American Masculinity


Book Description

Throughout America's past, some men have feared the descent of their gender into effeminacy, and turned their eyes to the ring in hopes of salvation. This work explains how the dominant fight sports in the United States have changed over time in response to broad shifts in American culture and ideals of manhood, and presents a narrative of American history as seen from the bars, gyms, stadiums and living rooms of the heartland. Ordinary Americans were the agents who supported and participated in fight sports and determined its vision of masculinity. This work counters the economic determinism prevalent in studies of American fight sports, which overemphasize profit as the driving force in the popularization of these sports. The author also disputes previous scholarship's domestic focus, with an appreciation of how American fight sports are connected to the rest of the world.




Marines


Book Description




Made in Detroit


Book Description

A New York Times Notable BookA powerfully candid memoir about growing up white in Detroit and the conflicted point of view it produced. Raised in Detroit during the ‘70s, ‘80s, and ‘90s, Paul Clemens saw his family growing steadily isolated from its surroundings: white in a predominately black city, Catholic in an area where churches were closing at a rapid rate, and blue-collar in a steadily declining Rust Belt. As the city continued to collapse—from depopulation, indifference, and the racial antagonism between blacks and whites—Clemens turned to writing and literature as his lifeline, his way of dealing with his contempt for suburban escapees and his frustration with the city proper. Sparing no one—particularly not himself—this is an astonishing examination of race and class relations from a fresh perspective, one forged in a city both desperate and hopeful.




Seasons of Grace


Book Description

Seasons of Grace is a history of the Catholic Church and community in southern lower Michigan from the 1830s through the 1950s. Seasons of Grace is a history of the Catholic Church and community in southern lower Michigan from the 1830s through the 1950s. More than a chronicle of clerical successions and institutional expansion, the book also examines those social and cultural influences that affected the development of the Catholic community. To document the course of institutional growth in the diocese, Tentler devotes a portion of the book to tracing the evolution of administrative structures at the Chancery and the founding of parishes, parochial schools, and social welfare organizations. Substantial attention is also given to the social history of the Catholic community, reflected in changes in religious practice, parish life and governance, and the role of women in church organizations and in devotional activities. Tentler also discusses the issue of Catholics in state and local politics and Catholic practice with regard to abortion, contraception, and intermarriage.




Jet


Book Description

The weekly source of African American political and entertainment news.