About The Book

Shadow Boxers: Sweat, Sacrifice & the Will to Survive in American Boxing Gyms  

With more than 175 photographs and 20 essays, Shadow Boxers is a portrait of the tender and brutal private life in America’s inner city boxing gyms in all their “glorious grunge.” The gyms exist in neighborhoods of violence and chaos, and teach a violent sport, but often act as a safe house and a demilitarized zone in which violence is ritualized and contained. They’re a tribute to those whose dreams of glory are forged out of sweat, sacrifice, and the will to survive.  

Photographer Jim Lommasson, recipient of the Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University, and a team of award winning writers, including Katherine Dunn, Bert Randolph Sugar, F. X. Toole, Carlo Rotella, Kate Sekules, Ralph Wiley, Lucius Shepard, Joe Rein, Loïc Wacquant, Robert Anasi, Rene Denfeld, Mark Kram, Tom Smario, Larry Seurynck, Cindy Lommasson, John Gattuso, and Timothy Taylor, 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. Foreword by Smokin’Joe Frazier.    

"An insider’s vivid, surprising look at a world most of us never get a chance to see – a world of battle-weary veterans and bright-eyed newcomers, of surrogate fathers and ancient skills and a sanctuary from the mean streets just outside the door. Not to be missed."
--Geoffrey C. Ward, author of Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (A book and a PBS series with Ken Burns)