www.cyberboxingzone.com/boxing/Dunn-Book-Review.htm -
[Cached Version]
Published on: 3/1/2006
Last Visited: 5/16/2009
A few years back, I had the opportunity to attend an amateur boxing event in a Portland, Oregon school gymnasium with author/journalist/fight fan/friend Katherine Dunn.
As an admirer of her imaginative and nuanced fiction, I seized a quiet moment between fights to pose the ultimate sophisto-smartass query: How did some one who excelled in the delicate art of storytelling reconcile her love of boxing with the violence inflicted on its participants?
She sized me up with the calm, generous gaze of a teacher enlightening an eager, but remedial, student.
She had obviously spent years considering and shaping her answer.
"Because people's lives are never cleaner or purer than when they are chasing the dream."
One Ring Circus, a collection culled from 20+ years of Dunn's boxing-themed pieces, chronicles the sweat-soaked legs of that chase, and dissects the components of that elusive dream.
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"The flat fact," Dunn writes in "School of Hard Knocks," her essay on the dynamics of training, "is that a boxing gym is a place where men are allowed to be kind to one another.
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Dunn reads the papers, but rarely hews to the conventional wisdom.
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Katherine Dunn, Lucius Shepard
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Chris Bushnell, DscribeDC, Katherine Dunn, Dan Hanley, Eric Jorgensen, Adam Pollack, JD Vena, Lucius Shepard, Ron Lipton, Dean Vios