In his last year of eligibility, Robert Anasi, age thirty-two, decided to fight in the Golden Gloves tournament, the premier event in amateur boxing. "The gym becomes a way of life," he explains, and so it does for the reader, as Anasi ushers us into the world of training and competition, of friendly rivalry, of artistry and violence. He tells his story not as a journalist on assignment but as a man in the midst of one of the great adventures of his life, and in his hands "a dying blood sport is reincarnated as a metaphor for redemption under flawed circumstances" (Nita Rao, The Village...

A firsthand account of the swift transformation of Williamsburg, from factory backwater to artists' district to trendy hub and high-rise colony

Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is now so synonymous with hipster culture and the very idea of urban revitalization--so well-known from Chicago to Cambodia as the playground for the game of ironized status-seeking and lifestyle one-upmanship--that it's easy to forget how just a few years ago it was a very different neighborhood: a spread of factories, mean streets and ratty apartments that the rest of New York City feared and everyone...