July: Books, Baseball, Bluegrass Music, and a Whole Lot of Driving

Just in case anyone is wondering, I haven't disappeared for good.  It's unusual for me to go three days without posting something "bookish" here, but I've been attending a youth baseball tournament with my grandson's team for three days of two games per day this weekend, and that's kept me from posting.  I have, in fact, been lucky to get some reading in but that's been about it.  So now I'm behind on writing at least two book reviews and have another two coming up this week, looks like.  But it's been great fun and worth the lost time.

If any of you are curious, his team finished fourth after being eliminated late this afternoon by the number one seed in the tourney in a last-inning 4-3 defeat.  (The teams are made up of 14-to-15-year-old boys and my grandson is a catcher/outfielder on his team).  

The second half of July is going to be even more hectic for me because I'm leaving for Columbus, Ohio, on the 16th for a four-day bluegrass music festival that begins on the 20th.  I allow three or four days on both ends of the festival for the driving, so I may go "dark" for a day or so a few more times in July.  This year is especially iffy because I'm still recovering from my broken hip (surgery was May 7) and will be moving even slower than usual.

But stay tuned...I do hope to post here quite a few times while I'm on the road, be it music news, book news, or whatever catches my eye as I drive northeast from Houston.  Hope to see you here.

West Texas Middleweight

WEST TEXAS MIDDLEWEIGHT

The Story of LaVern Roach (Sport in the American West Series)

by

Frank Sikes

Genre: Biography

Publisher: Texas Tech University Press

Date of Publication: June 30, 2016

Number of Pages: 288

Scroll down for Giveaway!

LaVern Roach, a skinny kid from the small town of Plainview, Texas, rose from obscurity to become one of boxing’s most popular figures during the 1940s. Roach’s rise to prominence occurred during an era when boxing shared the spotlight with baseball as the nation’s top two professional sports. As a result of Roach’s death—which marked the first nationally televised fight during which a boxer died from injuries received in the ring—the sport of boxing came under closer scrutiny by the general public than ever before.

West Texas Middleweight is the story of Roach’s all too brief journey from a West Texas amateur, to enlistment in the US Marines, where he captained the nation’s most successful military boxing team, to becoming a Madison Square Garden main eventer. He received the distinction of being named The Ring Magazine’s “Rookie of the Year” for 1947 and was considered a top ten contender for the middleweight championship of the world. This book chronicles Roach’s road to his final fight—and it explains why, as noted by legendary boxing trainer Angelo Dundee, “boxing changed because of LaVern Roach.”

PURCHASE FROM TEXAS TECH PRESS:

http://www.ttupress.org/ 

email: ttup@ttu.edu

phone: 800.742.2982

Middleweight boxer LaVern Roach was a very successful professional boxer from the end of World War II to early 1950 but today his name is a relatively unknown one even among boxing fans.  But despite being unfamiliar with the name LaVern Roach, I was very familiar with several of the boxers who were his biggest rivals at the time for the middleweight world championship, names like Rocky Marciano, Sugar Ray Robinson, and Jake LaMotta.  And now, thanks to West Texas Middleweight: The Story of LaVern Roach, the new LaVern Roach biography from Frank Sikes, I can add Roach to my limited understanding of that boxing era. 

LaVern Roach was born in 1925 in a small farming community just north of Plainview, Texas, in a part of the state known as the Texas Panhandle.  He discovered the sport of boxing as a ten-year-old when their father gave LaVern and his younger brother boxing gloves as Christmas presents.  LaVern immediately took the sport seriously, and when he wasn’t fighting his brother, he was trying to organize matches with neighborhood kids.  By the time he reached high school, LaVern had devised a training routine of his own that rivaled those of professional boxers of his day, and he seemed destined to join those fighters in the profession after high school.

But something called World War II intervened, and five days before his eighteenth birthday (and his high school graduation ceremony), LaVern joined the United States Marines.  The Marines recognized his exceptional boxing skills and LaVern was made part of the Marine boxing team that fought other teams as part of the effort to sell war bonds and boost overall morale.  During this period, LaVern also met the man who would be instrumental in guiding his professional boxing career at the end of the war: Sergeant John Abood, manager of the Marine boxing team.

LaVern Roach began his professional career after World War II ended, but before his discharge from the Marines, and he was immediately successful, winning four of his first five fights by knockout before losing for the first time to an immensely more experienced boxer who disguised his true identity in order to get the match.  As an amateur, he had a record of 100 wins and 5 losses (with four of the losses coming before he turned eighteen), so his fast start as a professional was not a surprise to those in the sport.  His unusual good looks and his success made him one of the more popular boxers of his day, and LaVern Roach seemed destined for great things.

Author Frank Sikes does not limit “the story of LaVern Roach” to his exploits in the boxing ring, however.  The reader learns of aspects of LaVern’s personal life (his childhood, his parents, his school days, and the love of his life, Evelyn Roach and their children) that give a clear picture of how fine a man LaVern Roach was.  To this day Plainview High School chooses one of its senior boys for the LaVern Roach Award, the highest honor that a Plainview High School senior boy can attain because it is given to the boy who best embodies the LaVern Roach lifestyle of “clean living, good citizenship, and sportsmanship.” 

West Texas Middleweight does LaVern Roach proud.

Frank Sikes, a third-generation West Texan, grew up in Plainview, where LaVern Roach, along with Jimmy Dean, were hometown heroes.  Sikes graduated from Texas Tech in 1967, then was a US Navy Officer proudly serving aboard the USS Little Rock stationed in Gaeta, Italy from 1968-1970.  He attended the University of Houston School of Business, from 1973 to 1975, and got his master's degree in religion from Wayland Baptist University in 2011. Frank and his wife Nancy have been married for 50 years and have two grown children out of the house, and two Boston Terriers, Molly and Maggie (or as some suggest Boston terrorists) who rule the house. Lubbock has been home for the past 30 years with stops in Newport, RI; San Francisco, CA; Gaeta, Italy; Houston, TX; and Albuquerque, NM.  West Texas Middleweight is his first book. Connect with the author on FACEBOOK.

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GIVEAWAYS! GIVEAWAYS! GIVEAWAYS!

3 WINNERS:

 Each Wins a Signed Copy of the Book 

plus

2 GRAND PRIZE WINNERS: 

Each Wins a Signed Copy of the Book PLUS a $25 Barnes & Noble Gift Card

(US ONLY)

   June 1 - June 10, 2016

a Rafflecopter giveaway

CHECK OUT THE OTHER GREAT BLOGS ON THE TOUR:

7/1       Country Girl Bookaholic  – Review

7/2       My Book Fix Blog – Author Interview #1

7/3       Forgotten Winds – Guest Post #1

7/4       Margie's Must Reads – Review

7/5       Blogging for the Love of Authors and Their Books – Promo

7/6       StoreyBook Reviews  – Author Interview #2

7/7       Book Chase – Review

7/8       The Page Unbound – Author Interview #3

7/9       Missus Gonzo  – Guest Post #2

7/10    It's a Jenn World – Review

 

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St. Louis Noir

St. Louis Noir is just the latest of about a dozen of the short story collections in this Akashic series that I’ve read now, and the streak continues – not a single one of them has disappointed me.  Each of the collections begins with an introduction from the book’s editor (in this instance, Scott Phillips) that helps set the overall tone for what is to follow.  As Phillips says, the St. Louis region has not had an easy time in recent years, and that makes the city the perfect setting for this kind of hardcore crime fiction.  Consider that one of Phillips’s definitions of noir is fiction that “traffics in fatality and doom and bad luck and characters who persistently, knowingly, act against their own best interests” and you have an idea of what is to come.

Among my favorite stories in St. Louis Noir is one called “Deserted Cities of the Heart” (by Paul D. Marks) in which a loner of an IT nerd with a security clearance is convinced to hack into a witness protection data base with disastrous results by the attractive young out-of-towner who suddenly comes into his life.   Another is “A Paler Shade of Death” (by Laura Benedict) about a young woman that many suspect is guilty of killing her four-year-old son.  Now that her marriage has fallen apart, she is trying to convince herself that it is time for a fresh start – but is it?  Two other stories are particular standouts: “The Brick Wall” (by John Lutz) and “One Little Goddam Thing” by the collection’s editor Scott Phillips.  The first is a rather Hitchcockian story involving revenge of the most ingeniously delicate variety, and the second involves revenge of the cruder, but equally effective, type. 

St. Louis Noir also includes what is titled “A Poetic Interlude,” four short poems from Michael Castro.  In very few words, the first two pieces (“In St. Louis Heat” and “Gaslight Square”) paint vividly memorable pictures of St. Louis street scenes, but the third poem, “St. Louis Blues Revisited” strikes a note I wish it had not stricken by referencing “the cold cop who killed Michael Brown.”  Perhaps I am misreading the poet’s intention in making that reference, but I do not see that it adds much of anything to mood of the poem, even coming in the poem’s very first stanza as it does.  Much worse is a similar reference in author Umar Lee’s short author biography (whether written by Lee or by the editor did, I do not know) to the “murder of Michael Brown.”  That reference serves no purpose whatsoever other than to explain the politics of Umar Lee who is “presently a candidate for mayor of St. Louis.”

The bottom line: St. Louis Noir is another worthy addition to what is perhaps already the best series of short story collections to be published in decades.

(Review Copy provided by Publisher)