"Explore[s] boxing's seedy underside by presenting readers with a gallery of biographical portraits from a period in Boston history when the sport and mob violence were frequently linked. Delivering staccato and cinematic details, the author looks at the 20th-century thugs, waterfront rats, and promising local youths whose lives became entangled with the gangsters, sharklike cops, and backroom politicians who created and sustained the old world of Boston ward politics. In economical passages, Stradley shows how surprisingly often the thread connecting all these men was boxing...[A] gritty, true-crime narrative...with hard-edged prose and a total absence of cheap moralizing...[A] stark and gripping account."--Kirkus Reviews

"[A] book that stands at the intersection of boxing and murder. These are the true-crime stories of men in Boston in the first half of the 20th century who dreamed of being great fighters but couldn't make it past the fringe of the sport, and in their desperation chose criminal plots, resulting in grim ends. Boston itself, morphing into something new, in part by the violent actions of these boxer criminals, is a key feature of the book, which demonstrates that the confluence of boxing, poverty, crime, and the urban landscape is not the realm of fiction alone."--Crime Reads, "The Classics of Boxing Literature"

"In a juicy mix of mayhem and pathos, Don Stradley writes movingly about the unusually high number of Boston boxers who found themselves on the wrong side of the law, usually with fatal consequences. Stradley weaves together details with dark humor but threads his narrative with compassion for the men who fought hard for our entertainment and were defeated by life. If you want to read about the Boston That Was, this is a captivating narrative of the past."--Stephanie Schorow, author of Inside the Combat Zone: The Stripped Down Story of Boston's Most Notorious Neighborhood

"The word 'beautiful' may sound odd when describing a murderous volume in which men are shot, stabbed, strangled, and beaten to death with pipes and lead sashes, but Stradley so economically describes the lives of these men that [best-selling author T.J. English] is right, it is beautiful."--George Hassett, Dig Boston