Daniel Matlin
Roll With The Punches
Joe Louis: Hard Times Man
By Randy Roberts
Yale University Press 352pp £18.99 order from our bookshop
To Americans living in the first half of the twentieth century, boxing mattered. Now venerated or deplored by the few and tolerated or ignored by the many, in the pre-Second World War era boxing ranked alongside baseball as one of Americans’ two truly national, popular forms of sporting entertainment. Both were crucial to their sense of identity and to the shaping of their national culture. But boxing was unique on two counts.
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