Arguably the greatest boxer never to win a world title, Charles Burley was the most-feared fighter of his generation and one of the most-avoided fighters in the history of boxing. This revised edition has an expanded record for Burley that includes amateur bouts, a Tale-of-the-Tape, venues, and weights for Burley and his opponents.

There used to be a particularly dangerous and crime-ridden alley located in what is now the SoHo district of New York City; it ran between ramshackle tenements in a black neighborhood known as Darktown in the early 19th century. "Murderers' Row" was no place for the decent or the delicate. By the 1870s, the term was used in direct reference to the second tier of the Tombs prison, which loomed a half mile from the alley. In 1918, New York was cheering six sluggers in the Yankees batting order who were bringing fans to their feet; "murderers' row" they called them. Boxing is to baseball what a film noir is to a musical. It's the bad neighborhood of sports. It's no place for the decent or the delicate. It too has a murderers' row: eight elite and notorious fighters from the 1940s who evoke the shadowy origins of the name. One of them was mobbed-up to his eyebrows, another was an unsolved mystery until Springs Toledo exhumed and escorted him into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. The oldest, an ex-con, ended his prime in a San Francisco jail after shooting a rival in an all-night restaurant; that rival stood five feet five and fought light heavyweights--while drunk. Two of them were killers. They were the best of boxing's underclass, barred from title shots because of the danger surrounding them and the color of their skin. No less than Sugar Ray Robinson and Henry Armstrong steered clear of them. Their remarkable stories before, during, and after their bloody ring careers are quintessential Americana--after hours. Springs Toledo is an award-winning essayist who has contributed to City Journal, Salon, Boxing News, The Ring, HBO, Sports on Earth, and The Sweet Science. He is a native of Boston, Massachusetts.

Greatness is often overlooked in its own time. For Ezzard Charles--one of boxing's most skilled practitioners, with a record of 93-25-1 (52 KO)--recognition took decades. Named by The Ring magazine as the greatest light heavyweight of all time, Charles was frustrated in his attempts to get a shot at the 175-pound title, and as World Heavyweight Champion (1949-1951) struggled to win the respect of boxing fans captivated by Joe Louis' power and charisma. This first-ever biography of "The Cincinnati Cobra" covers his early life in a small country town and his career in the glamorously dirty business of prizefighting in the 1950s, one of the sport's Golden Ages. Charles' fights with Louis, Jersey Joe Walcott, Rocky Marciano and his three wins over the legendary Archie Moore are detailed.

On June 10, 1948, the eyes of the sporting world were focused on a minor league ballpark in Newark, New Jersey--the unlikely venue of a much-anticipated rubber match between the two men at the top of boxing's prestigious middleweight division, Tony Zale and Rocky Graziano. They had met in the ring twice before, each winning one bout. In their third fight, Zale, a clever and powerful puncher, hoped to regain his title from Graziano, a knock-out artist six years his junior. This book tells the story of the greatest middleweight trilogy of boxing's Golden Age, a championship battle Newark hoped would catalyze brighter days for a city rife with political corruption and organized crime and grappling with the beginning of deindustrialization.

The Hogue twins were legends in the fight game in and around San Diego during the 1930s and '40s - the heyday of professional boxing in the USA. Written with the cooperation of family members, this biography tells a tragic tale of too much, too soon for a couple of young hopefuls trying to make their way on the world stage.

Easily the most enduring of all sports questions is "Who was/is the best . . . ?" Perhaps in no sport is the question more asked and argued over than in boxing. And in boxing perhaps none is more qualified to answer the question than Bert Randolph Sugar. In Boxing's Greatest Fighters, not only does the former publisher of Ring Magazine tell us who the best fighters were, he lists them in order. Could Sugar Ray Robinson have beaten Muhammad Ali? Could Sugar Ray Leonard have beaten Sonny Liston? The answer, most experts agree, would be "no." But what if, as Bert Sugar has done here, one were to take all the boxers and reduce them in the mind's eye to the same height, the same weight, and the same ring conditions? The answers would be quite different. And while some fans may express outrage that Rocky Marciano barely makes the top twenty, and Marvin Hagler staggers into the top seventy-five, others will nod eagerly when they read that Harry Greb and Benny Leonard were better than just about anybody. So whether you read Boxing's Greatest Fighters cover to cover, pick your favorites at random, or simply browse through the many rare photographs, "at the bell, come out arguing."

From the author of the bestselling "Brotherman" comes the first and only biography of boxing genius Sugar Ray Robinson, considered by many to be pound-for-pound the best American boxer ever.

If we lived in a liquid world, the concept of a "machine" would make no sense. Liquid life is metaphor and apparatus that discusses the consequences of thinking, working, and living through liquids. It is an irreducible, paradoxical, parallel, planetary-scale material condition, unevenly distributed spatially, but temporally continuous. It is what remains when logical explanations can no longer account for the experiences that we recognize as part of "being alive."Liquid Life references a third-millennial understanding of matter that seeks to restore the agency of the liquid soul for an ecological era, which has been banished by reductionist, "brute" materialist discourses and mechanical models of life. Offering an alternative worldview of the living realm through a "new materialist" and "liquid" study of matter, Armstrong conjures forth examples of creatures that do not obey mechanistic concepts like predictability, efficiency, and rationality. With the advent of molecular science, an increasingly persuasive ontology of liquid technologies can be identified. Through the lens of lifelike dynamic droplets, the agency for these systems exists at the interfaces between different fields of matter/energy that respond to highly local effects, with no need for a central organizing system.Liquid Life seeks an alternative partnership between humanity and the natural world. It provokes a re-invention of the languages of the living realm to open up alternative spaces for exploration, including contributor Rolf Hughes' "angelology" of language, which explores the transformative invocations of prose poetry, and Simone Ferracina's graphical notations that help shape our concepts of metabolism, upcycling, and designing with fluids. A conceptual and practical toolset for thinking and designing, liquid life reunites us with the irreducible "soul substance" of living things, which will neither be simply "solved," nor go away.

Smith's narrative relates not only his personal experiences, but also includes many anecdotes about other Kentucky slaves and masters. Many of his stories are humorous and pleasant, relating to sporting adventures and leisure activities. Others, however, relate instances of neglect, violence, and the mistreatment of slaves by their masters and other white authorities. Although Smith's narrative focuses primarily on slave family life on large plantations, it also highlights the interactions between whites and blacks, and the dynamics of those relationships.