This valuable and often amusing book is composed of three separate essays that recount the author's three years of training at the Woodlawn Boys Club. Now demolished, the club was once a well-known Chicago boxing institution sponsored by United Way and identified as a club "that beat the street," a nod to the effort to provide young people, young men especially, with an alternative to dangerous neighborhood streets (p. 30).

Wacquant was a member from 1988 to 1991, when he was enrolled in the PhD program in sociology at the University of Chicago. He was new to boxing but not to other competitive sports, and he certainly was not new to sociology. A native of France, he had studied with Pierre Bourdieu, the celebrated postmodern theorist of sociology (1930-2002). During Wacquant's time at the boxing club, Bourdieu visited him there, perhaps doing field work of his own (p. 3n1). We get no details, but I would have loved to watched the visit. Continue here

December 2021