Rings: On the Life and Family of a Southern Fighter

In this momentous debut, Randy Bates finds in the daily lives of one American family the pathos and drama we usually associate with the finest fiction. Rings is strict, however, in presenting only actual people and incidents. The book takes as its protagonist Collis Phillips, a black man who, one generation away from slavery managed to turn a youth of caddying:, shoe shining, and running bootlegged whiskey into a career as a successful boxer in New Orleans during the days of Jim Crow. But b...