With more than 175 photographs and 20 essays, Shadow Boxers is a portrait of boxing gyms in all their “glorious grunge” and a tribute to the fighters and trainers whose dreams of glory are forged out of sweat, sacrifice, and the will to survive.

At one time there was a boxing gym in every sizable town in America. Today, they are found mostly in big cities, tucked away in shabby lofts and basements in the tough parts of town. Those that survive are the repositories of a centuries-old tradition of pugilistic knowledge that encompasses not only the physical mechanics of the sport but a code of respect and discipline that, at its best, transforms raw aggression into “sweet science.”

Award-winning photographer Jim Lommasson and a team of veteran boxing writers, including Katherine Dunn, Bert Sugar, Carlo Rotella, Kate Sekules, Ralph Wiley, and Lucius Shepard, capture the fierce beauty of these vanishing institutions, giving readers an unflinching look at the brutality of the sport but also its grace, its poetry, its blood-and-bone humanity. What they reveal to us is that boxing gyms are more than training facilities. They are sanctuaries in bad neighborhoods, lifelines for troubled kids, and shrines to the traditions of the sport.

Shadow Boxers: Sweat, Sacrifice & the Will to Survive in American Boxing Gyms, 176 pages, cloth, 9"x12", 175 photos, ISBN: 0-9656338-2-9, $39.95

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