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In Print
November/December 2003
Brief Reviews
Carlo Rotella '94PhD
Cut Time: An Education at the Fights
Houghton Mifflin, $24.00
Reviewed by Ben McGrath '99
On a rainy morning in 1991, Carlo Rotella, then a Yale graduate student in English, was driving his car through the intersection of Humphrey and Orange streets in New Haven when he was broadsided by another driver who had run a red light. “I heard sound backward,” Rotella writes in Cut Time. “I heard—I hear—breaking glass before the crunch of metal on metal, both before the screech of ineffectual braking, all the sounds of the collision well before the shock … It was only after the impact, when my car was tilted up on its two right-side wheels and skidding sideways across the rain-slick intersection with the other car wedged into it just back of my driver’s side door and pushing like a snowplow, that I silently asked myself, ‘Why is that car coming at me so fast?’”
Six years later, Rotella was at an amateur boxing match in Erie, Pennsylvania. Two heavyweights named Shaeffer and Marzano were going at it, and it quickly became clear that Marzano had Schaeffer outclassed. Sure enough, in the second round, Schaeffer let his guard down, just briefly, and Marzano responded, “with programmatic certitude,” delivering a “big, thwacking uppercut” that ended the bout. In that mo- ment, Rotella remembers, “Marzano looked like Conan the Barbarian swatting off a Pict’s head with a broadax in one of those Frank Frazetta paintings that pervaded the head-shop, automotive, and album-cover stratum of the art world in the 1970s.” It was the sort of blow whose force is so great and unexpected—so much like a car crash—that our minds are not well equipped to process it. “Hitting alters perception,” Rotella writes. “Our minds process a blow by rearranging their contents around it until the revised whole makes some kind of workable sense.”
Cut Time is not a typical boxing book, if there is such a thing, and the stories in it—nine chapters, each like a stand-alone essay—are not typical of boxing writing. This is by Rotella’s design (“I am suspicious of fight prose, including my own,” he says), and it is a good thing. Rotella, who by day teaches literature at Boston College, has long been interested in finding “ways to get something out of boxing”—he calls it an education—rather than dramatizing and glorifying it. His expertise comes not from time spent in the ring (“just a medium-sized truckful of metal struts, plywood flooring, foam padding, canvas, ropes, cables, and miscellaneous parts”) but at ringside, a “gray borderland between the fights and the world.” At ringside, for instance, Rotella is able to observe that a boxer’s prefight walk, “the act that separates pugilist from gym dabbler,” has something in common with his own grandmother’s persevering hikes, despite frailty and old age, to the local Queens church or Key Food; it is a “compressed rendition of the fighter’s path through the larger world.”
In the course of drawing such connections—between automobile accidents and KO punches, ring entrances and matronly rituals—Rotella covers the full range of fighting. He writes about known professionals like Butterbean, “a one-ring version of the Harlem Globetrotters,” and Prince Naseem Hamed, “a bat-eared foreign popinjay whose yo-dog-yo dialogue came wrapped in an English accent and whose parodically 'American' boxing style often collapsed from improvisational looseness into slapstick;” he also writes about lesser pros and amateurs, such as the Flushing Flash (Kevin Kelley) and a journeyman punching bag named—no joke—Exum Speight. He describes the post-Lennox Lewis fight atmosphere at Jimmy’s Corner, a tiny bar that has somehow survived Times Square’s renewal, thus serving as the last reminder of a time when New York City was still known as “the Mecca of boxing.” And he describes, in great detail, a street fight that he witnessed outside a bar in Middletown, Connecticut, as an undergraduate nearly 20 years ago. This latter scrap, which Rotella calls “the most upliftingly unfair fistic mismatch I ever saw,” is recounted in hilarious detail, with principal characters named the Count, the Sage, and the Terminator. (Guess who won?) At the fight’s end, “the Count’s nose was a pulsating knot of aggrieved tissue, snot, and blood, some of which had splattered in a jet down his bare chest.”
If Rotella’s own ringside education is more personal than fistic, to use a favorite (and overused) word of his, we novices can still learn from him a great deal of inside information about what goes on within the ropes. For instance, the “Matthew Saad Muhammad syndrome” is a “tendency of some dead-game fighters with sound boxing skills to abandon technique, shape-shifting lycanthropically into brawlers who win exciting fights and inspire the fans' love by accepting several doozies on the kisser in order to deliver one of their own.” It is, Rotella warns us, not a wise strategy in the long run, leading as it inevitably does to extended beatings and atrophied skills. Another tip: “Even in an unequal contest the two combatants usually arrive at a working arrangement by some sort of compromise, around which the fight takes form. The referee, when he knows his business, enforces the terms of the fighters' compromise.” Prince Naseem is among the few pros who refuse to participate in the custom.
The book’s main recurring character—its hero, such as one exists—is Larry Holmes, with whom Rotella spent a fair amount of time in Easton, Pennsylvania, where Holmes trains and coaches. Holmes is something of a forgotten champion these days, rarely mentioned alongside Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier or even George Foreman, but Rotella insists that, in his prime, Holmes was “as good as anyone who ever lived.” (The most memorable Holmes scene in Cut Time is a retelling of an old bout with Earnie Shavers, in which Holmes was on the receiving end of a car-crash blow: he “went down with a finality one does not often see, not even in the movies … It looked like he had been shot with a tranquilizer dart just as he stepped on a land mine.”) Now in his fifties, Holmes has become a serious businessman, amassing real estate wherever he can. Rotella notes that occasionally, when discussing business matters, Holmes pronounces the word “bidness,” by which he apparently means “not just his financial affairs but also the whole unsentimental history attached to his name.” “People talk about ‘I love boxing.’ That’s bullshit,” Holmes tells Rotella. “Boxing is bidness, that’s what it is. Bidness.”
Mark Oppenheimer '96, '03PhD
Knocking on Heaven’s Door: American Religion in the Age of Counterculture
Yale University Press, $30
Reviewed by Rabbi James E. Ponet '68
The sixties, the season of my youth, were, in my (white, northeastern, middle-class) experience, a painful—occasionally joyful—period of wild experimentation, risk, and confusion. Many of my generation still feel surprise and wonder that we survived those tumultuous years when there seemed so many ways to die young, whether in the jungles of Vietnam or by, say, leaping off a building under the influence of LSD, challenging segregation in the South, protesting the war, serving as president of the United States, or running for that office. Confident that the American economy would always recompense us for our talents, we thought it natural if not obligatory to imagine, taste, shape, and struggle for a more just, peaceful, loving world than the one into which we had been born.
Or so, at least, it seemed to me.
From my perspective, there simply is no way to make descriptive sense of the sixties without focusing on the Vietnam War. For years we undergrads watched the war on the news every evening from our couches in common rooms, always aware that but for the grace of a 2-S military deferment we could have been there too. Our poorer and darker brothers, unprotected by class privilege, fought a war that most of us could not justify. If you saw it that way, and I did, then you either lived silently in bad faith or you noisily protested the war, while living in bad faith. When in March 1968, during our senior year, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not run for re-election, we felt like we had unseated a president. Hopes soared and then crashed as first Martin Luther King and then Bobby Kennedy were assassinated. Both of these men had opposed the war in Vietnam. We graduated into that war or into vectors that eluded it.
Interestingly, Mark Oppenheimer, a historian who writes from the perspective of the first generation born after the sixties (an era that he dates from 1955 to 1975), concludes Knocking on Heaven’s Door with the observation that “despite the perception that sixties consciousness was Vietnam consciousness, religious people [at least] did not seem to move back and forth between antiwar activism and other kinds of activism. The war was an issue unto itself.” The counterculture that in Oppenheimer’s judgment challenged and finally dominated American mainstream culture for a time was not, he says, the product of the Vietnam War. “Rather, it was a creative engagement with the legacy of African American struggle and a willingness to embrace countercultural language—'with it,' 'groove,' 'this is my thing'—and symbols and music.”
The sixties, Oppenheimer maintains in his first book, offered America “a new cultural model more liberal than any that had gone before,” and this new liberalism, he tells us, “was keyed not to liberal politics but rather to more liberal assumptions about etiquette, clothes, language, music, and sexual mores.” In the end, the impact of the “wild and unwieldy” sixties can be summarized quite simply: “The country loosened up.”
The young historian is not at all certain that this loosening was good for America, but by tracing the impact of the counterculture on five traditional religions he finds can he deliver some good news: “American religion responded to the counterculture by acceding to some of its demands, primarily the formal and aesthetic ones—what worship looked like and who performed it—without relinquishing much institutional power.”
Oppenheimer’s selection of five religious groups to serve as a “stand-in” for American religion is fascinating and provocative. Unitarians are depicted as the most liberal; Southern Baptists, the least; Episcopalians, patrician and hierarchical; Catholics, hierarchical and international; and Jews, “the least predictable.” Each religious group is studied from the point of view of a single defining story: how Unitarians coped with homosexuality, how Baptists dealt with opposition to the Vietnam War, how Episcopalians dealt with feminism, how Catholics developed a folk mass, and how Jews organized small communal havurot (informal affinity groups formed within congregations for the purpose of study, worship, or service).
The stories do not, however, convincingly converge. Oppenheimer’s “American religion” is finally homogenized into something like a membership community, which claims meaningful sacrifice from its faithful and denies them worshipful participation in any other group. Whether this is a full portrait of the diversity of American religion is debatable.
Oppenheimer’s Jews, at least, seem to resist incorporation into this model, in spite of his efforts to demonstrate otherwise. This is in part because one is a Jew by descent, as he notes (although the numbers of those who have become “Jews by choice” continue to grow). Therefore, if you try to minimize ethnicity, as classic Reform Judaism did, the remaining essence is likely to turn into a kind of Unitarianism; and if you try to reduce religiosity, you may get unvarnished nationalism. The result is a wide variety of forms of Judaism.
Moreover, the young Jews who founded havurot in the sixties were not, in my judgment, apolitical, as Oppenheimer mostly characterizes them. The absence of the great Abraham Joshua Heschel, for instance, is misleading. Heschel, teacher to both Arthur Green and Jacob Neusner (who are extensively cited), embodied the Jewish sense that the political must be fused with the spiritual, that the struggle for personal fulfillment must take place within the constraints of the communal. He was equally active in fighting for civil rights and in opposing the war in Vietnam.
While a few scholars have discerned a historical analog to the havurot in first-century attempts like those of the Essenes to create dissenting, world-renouncing fellowships, the havurot were not acts of countercultural rebellion—attempts to drop out—as perhaps some of the sixties communes were. Rather, they were urban attempts to recover what had been a strong mode of Jewish living and learning in Eastern Europe that had survived up till World War II: small community (shtetl), small school (yeshiva). And this struggle to taste deep communal learning and living was inseparable from serious political thinking, feeling, and doing.
All of this is to suggest that, at least for American Jews, Oppenheimer’s clear distinction between the cultural and the political actually distorts the way sixties Jewish activists understood themselves. As Arthur Green observes, in his recent book, Eheyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow, “The religious life exists in order to keep both the individual and the community in touch with our own deepest moments of experience and insight . How we live, how we love, how we treat one another are all part of our response to those moments.”
Brief Reviews
Edward L. Ayers '80PhD
In the Presence of Mine Enemies: War in the Heart of America, 1859–1863
W. W. Norton, $27.95
In seeking to explain the Civil War, “we search … for the reassuring patterns that lead to the end of the story we already know,” writes Ayers.But to explore how it was experienced, he turns instead to “everyday people who could glimpse only part of the drama they were living.”
Susan Choi '90
American Woman
HarperCollins, $24.95
The infamous Patty Hearst story becomes grist for a fictionalized look at radicalism, class, race, and power. Novelist Choi bases her protagonist loosely on Hearst handler Wendy Yoshimura—hired to shepherd a group of fugitive revolutionaries whose plans go awry.
William Lane Craig and Walter Sinnott-Armstrong '82PhD
God? A Debate between a Christian and an Atheist
Oxford University Press, $19.95
Craig, of the Talbot School of Theology, argues for God’s existence; Dartmouth philosopher Sinnott-Armstrong speaks for the atheists. Together they delve into the moral foundations of such fundamental questions as the nature of evil and the Big Bang.
David Brion Davis, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History
Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery
Harvard University Press, $18.95
In this accessible, elegant book, a science journalist surveys the “galaxy hunters, microwave eavesdroppers, gravity theorists, and atom smashers” seeking cosmological truths about Mother Corn and Genesis, fire and ice.
Peter Stansky '53
Sassoon: The Worlds of Philip and Sybil
Yale University Press, $35.00
Philip Sassoon and his sister Sybil, Jews in the world of 20th-century British high society, were patrons and subjects of John Singer Sargent. Through their lives, Stanford historian Stansky examines power, politics, old money, new money, and the art world.
Dolores Hayden, Professor of Architecture and American Studies
Building Suburbia: Green Fields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000
Pantheon, $26
Why does suburbia dominate the U.S. landscape? In this examination of the past and future of the suburbs, Hayden asserts that “unlike every other affluent civilization, Americans have idealized the house and yard rather than the model neighborhood or the ideal town.”  |
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