Just finished Randy Robert's book and thought it was ok. Have Adam Pollack's two books lined up for later in the year. Are these the best books on Johnson? I know Jack did a few himself but he might have stretched the truth a little in them.
Adam's series is amazing if you are interested in the fighter. I always like his Auto-Bio... certainly not objective but you get something of the spirit of the man.
Papa Jack. The writing is beautiful. The fight descriptions are art and he tells the story w/out becoming a rote encyclopedia.
I read the one by Ward, Unforgivable Blackness, which also has an accompanying PBS documentary counterpart. It goes into a ton of detail, and you can guess by the name of the book that he employs a style where he describes Johnson's career within its social climate, which I enjoy. It's not particularly preachy either. I mean, for a pretty disgraceful part of our history, he does as good a job as anyone could of just being the messenger. Just feels somewhat longer than it needed to be. There seems to be a footnote every other page where he goes into an extensive tangent about something that doesn't feel that relevant. Also wish there was more information about some of his less-popular opponents. There's a ton in there about Langford, Jeffries, Ketchel, etc. But hardly anything about George Gardner, for example, who by all accounts seems a more worthy subject to discuss than say Klondike Haynes.
Unforgivable Blackness - the companion book to the two-part documentary - is very good. This content is protected I'm not really into books where every fight in a boxer's career is written like a round-by-round update on the message board, here.
Some of the footnotes were valuable. Seems to me pretty fair to hold them against the author if the reader has no way to distinguish which are most relevant and worth reading. The only way to find out is by reading them.
Valid point, but you can scan them pretty quick to find out if they interest you. My preference is to encourage footnotes. I think they are often as interesting or sometime even more so than the text.
About documentaries, there is also a good one from 1970. The documentary was also nominated for an academy award and the soundtrack is from Miles Davis, who made also an album "A Tribute to Jack Johnson". This content is protected This content is protected
For real detail nothing compares with Pollack's books .. not even close .. Roberts is a nice volume ... Unforgivable Blackness is solid too ..
Speaking of Pollack, anyone know why it seems like some of the best boxing books are either vanity published or published by the tiniest independent publishers? Is the audience that small of a niche? I would think just based on scholarship alone some of these books could have been picked up by bigger publishers.