Reviews for Precious and the Boo Hag

The average rating for Precious and the Boo Hag based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-01-20 00:00:00 John Luter Reads like it was written by that crusty Irish codger who hangs around the boxing gym talking shit with other old timers, which is what makes this book kind of terrible but also what makes it pretty damn great. I bought it in an airport and when I started reading on the plane was like, "Oh no, I just can't believe how crappy this is." But then for some reason I couldn't set it down, and I ended up getting sucked in and loving it way more than I've loved anything in awhile. You could say Pound for Pound got knocked down in the first round and lost the first few -- there were moments early on when I considered throwing in the towel -- but then turned things around fast and wound up with a knockout victory. If the corniness of that just now bothered you, then don't read this book. In fact, if any corniness or cheesiness or central-casting-type cartoony characters or efforts to capture ethnic or regional slang bother you, don't read this book. Furthermore, I would absolutely never in a million years recommend this to anyone who isn't into boxing, because they'd likely be unforgiving of what's not good in here and bored by the rest, so if you don't love boxing, you shouldn't read this book. But if you do happen to be enamored of boxing and its many contradictions -- its romance and seediness, its vulgar brutality and scientific sweetness, its art and poetry and its clumsy cliches, not to mention its often repellant but always fascinating relationship to race -- you could easily fall in love with this book. Similarly to the way that I feel bad about myself when I'm watching a particularly bloody fight, I felt bad about myself for relishing a plot that turned on the love of a desperate man for a stray dog, not to mention the many characters who my better, educated, critical self recognized as enormously problematic, but so what? No young men were harmed in the writing of Pound for Pound, which makes it an infinitely less damning form of entertainment than prizefighting, from an ethical perspective. It was the most fun reading that I've had in awhile, probably because I keep trying to read highfalutin stuff that's supposed to be "a classic" or "critically acclaimed," but it turns out I don't necessarily want to read something that's gorgeously written or spellbindingly original or profoundly intelligent or otherwise deemed artistically and intellectually superior by someone somewhere who's artistically and intellectually superior to me. This was a good story with heart, and that goes a long way.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-10-14 00:00:00 Gloria Jeziorski Before this book, I knew about F.X. Toole from reading his short story collection originally published as Rope Burns; better known as Million Dollar Baby: Stories from the Corner from the story in it that became an Academy Award-winning movie. He was seventy when that collection was published. He did not live to see the movie. He did not live to see this book in print. He had a bad heart. He carried his 900 page manuscript of Pound For Pound to the hospital when he went in for emergency surgery, asking the doctor to get him enough time to finish the book. That did not happen. Toole's children turned to Nat Sobel and James Wade to prepare the manuscript for publication, although they are credited for this only in the forward by James Ellroy. The voice in the story is all Toole. He sings from first page to last, and the reader can feel the emotion that must have been driving him to get one more sentence down, one more paragraph, one more chapter before the time came when he would be down for the count. The book is powerful. We follow Dan Cooley through some of the most intense days of his life, as he struggles with loss of loved ones, loss of faith, loss of nearly everything that means anything to him. We meet 'Chicky' Garza, a young boxer with a connection to Dan that he has no idea about. And we get to know the world of boxing. How to move, how to punch, to jab, how to appreciate the beauty of the sport even while deploring its ugly side. Oh, and let's not forget Barky, who came along at exactly the time he was needed and proved his worth more than once. I could babble on forever here, but mostly I want to say that whether you like boxing, loathe it or don't care one way or another, read this book. It is a human story: raw, real, hardly ever politically correct, but intensely moving and unforgettable.