Word: gardners
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...CITY, by Leonard Gardner. A brilliant exception to the general rule that boxing fiction seldom graduates beyond caricature, this first novel convincingly explores the limbo lives of three men in a shoddy California town, who cling to the ring and get nowhere...
...Stanford, on the recommendation of a trustee committee headed by John W. Gardner, the board of trustees unanimously decided to seek broader viewpoints by filling two current vacancies in its ranks with faculty members from other universities. The trustees also approved a nine-man expansion of the 23-member board, including four Stanford graduates aged 35 or under, and agreed to give students and faculty voting membership on most trustee committees. If Stanford gains court approval for the required change in its founding grant, the first election of new board members will be held this year...
Unlike the army of Hemingway romanticists who cultivate fighters to show off their feel for the sport, Gardner has a real understanding of the ring and the nameless people who are scarred by it. With a poetic touch and dry swift phrasing, he has created a remarkable portrait of a marginal, subterranean world in which two fighters and a manager occupy numbing neutral corners in the struggle for life...
...place is Stockton, Calif., a city filled with a litter of lost people, most of whom pile on urine-smelling buses each morning and head for the onion, peach or walnut fields for a killing day on skinny wages. Gardner's three characters are grafted to this landscape. An aging (29) lightweight, lush and former local contender, Billy Tully grieves over his split with his wife, who occupies his flophouse dreams and gives him a convenient excuse for not fighting. Then one day, finding himself in a Y.M.C.A. gym, he meets Ernie Munger, an 18-year-old would...
Marks of Hell. Gardner's fight talk is brilliantly accurate. The true pathos of fighting as a subsistence trade, he shows, comes not from scheming and exploitation but from the slow corruption of courage and spirit. "Fat City," as fighters sometimes call success in boxing, is bankrupt. The long sleek cars, the sweet shock of public recognition, the feel of silk on skin is, for most fighters, pure celluloid fantasy. Their daily rounds are marked instead by steady pain and a sameness that is itself the mark of most hells...