University of Arkansas Press Publishes Book by 'Current Champ in Boxing Literature'

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FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. – The University of Arkansas Press has just published Boxing Is … Reflections on the Sweet Science (paper, $22.50), by veteran boxing chronicler Thomas Hauser. The press has recently learned that the book was chosen by the American Library Association as one of the top 10 sports books for 2010, an honor that will be formally announced later this year in the association’s magazine, Booklist.

The book is a collection of the author’s 2009 articles from the popular secondsout.com website, and it is the press’ seventh publication by Hauser. The most recent was An Unforgiving Sport, Hauser’s collected articles from 2008, of which the American Library Association’s Booklist said: “Many journalists have written fine boxing pieces, but none has written as extensively or as memorably as Hauser. … Hauser remains the current champ of boxing literature.”

Boxing Is... brings together the behind-the-scenes stories of the year’s most memorable personalities and events. Hauser takes us from Manny Pacquiao’s dressing room in the tense moments before 2009’s biggest fight to an in-depth portrait of Sugar Ray Robinson. Former heavyweight champion Lennox Lewis said of Hauser’s writing, “A hundred years from now, if people want to learn about boxing in this era, they’ll read Thomas Hauser.”

According to press director Larry Malley, Hauser is part of a stable of University of Arkansas Press authors writing on sports and society. “Great sports writing gets at something in our culture, including issues of race and gender, that means so much more than the outcome of a competition,” Malley said. “So many great writers, like Ernest Hemingway and Joyce Carol Oates for example, have had a fascination with boxing in particular. We see Thomas Hauser as our own worthy inheritor of this tradition and are proud to publish his investigations as to why men hit men for money, and what it all means.”

Hauser is the author of 39 books. His first work, Missing, was made into an Academy-Award-winning film. He later authored Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times, the definitive biography of the most famous fighter ever. In 2004, the Boxing Writer’s Association of America honored Hauser with the Nat Fleischer Award for Career Excellence in Boxing Journalism, the highest honor the association can bestow on a writer. “The Truth About John Duddy” (included in Boxing Is...) was honored by the BWAA as the best investigative journalism written about boxing in 2009.