The Sweet Science by A.J. Liebling: Best Boxing Book of All

Boxing lends itself to portrayal in the arts more than any other sport. Excluding love and war - although both of those topics are often deeply woven into the fabric of boxing itself - it translates superiorly than nearly any other subject or topic. The bone crushing violence of the sport is but a backdrop to the raw human emotion and the often desperate struggle to support a family, reach one's goals and overcome the harshest of obstacles. With hundreds of books and movies on the subject, one continues to stand alone in a place by itself. The Sweet Science by A.J. Liebling is far more than a collection of boxing essays. It is a snapshot of life and culture in the 1950s, and one man's immense fascination and amusement with it all.

The award winning author and icon became famous for his coverage of World War II and he published essays and books on everything from politics to traveling and dining in France and of course, the sweet science itself, boxing. The essays collected in The Sweet Science were originally published in The New Yorker, and they are the musings of an old fight fan pondering the current state of the sport.

Like so many boxing fans today, he found boxing in the 1950s to be severely lagging previous generations, however he also noted that every generation felt the same. Apparently coming to a more logical conclusion later on, Liebling says that, "The world isn't going backward, if you can just stay young enough to remember what it was really like when you were really young."

The sweet science was a phrase first coined by British writer and journalist Pierce Egan, who published volumes of text on boxing in the late 1700s and early 1800s known as Boxiana. Liebling refers to Egan as "the great historian", among other praising titles, and he considered his collection of essays the modern day extension of Boxiana.

More than just describing the back and forth battle of a boxing match, his essays probe deeper into the sport and the world that it was a part of. In a 30 page story, the fight itself may be described in four pages towards the end. The beef of what he talks about instead is his own journey of covering a fight, the magnitude of the event itself, the background figureheads and players that flood the scene and the somewhat magical goings on of a big fight night, or week, around town.

You'll find out how smart New Yorkers got to Yankee stadium when traffic was lined up, where boxers and managers hung out and what they said after and during a day at the gym, what adjacent fans in an arena shouted as a fight took place and whether Liebling agreed and on down the line. Truly, the fights themselves somehow manage to be subplots as Liebling journeys into a fighter's camp and gets to know a young champion or prospect and what his life is like or as he waxes poetic about a favorite fighter from the past.

Be forewarned, the bardic Liebling was both adroit and fulgurant in his abilities to reconnoiter the complex world of the fight game and his dithyrambs on boxing tend to be heavy on words no longer as quotidian as they once were. His oeuvre is perhaps a bit grandiloquent; however the perspicacious reader, with a dictionary by his side, will work through the essays with celerity.

If you're looking for a taste of what boxing is all about, The Sweet Science will far exceed even the loftiest of expectations. His essays may be about boxing, but they are really about everything that surrounded the world of boxing, and indeed surrounded the culture of the times. Liebling was a true expert at painting a mural with just a few words, and his essays are captivating, rewarding reads.