“An ambitious analysis of a singular neighborhood that in some ways serves as a microcosm for all urban neighborhoods. . . The author offers a nuanced narrative, partly personal and partly sociological, that keeps circling back to the same important truths about race, class, community, poverty, and crime. A thought-provoking deep dive into a neighborhood that remains in perpetual transition.”

“The neighborhoods of our childhood still live within us, shaping our perceptions of the world today. Carlo Rotella brings alive the past and present of his own neighborhood effect in the historic South Shore of Chicago, . . . in the process giving us what he calls equipment for living. His experiences conjure the reader’s own lost cities, making the book reach far beyond Chicago.”

“The World is Always Coming to an End is an investigation of a city in continual flux, the roiling tensions of race and class and respectability in wherever one calls home. It’s a powerful account that uses South Shore to capture both the story of Chicago (and through it, industrial and post-industrial cities nationwide) and what it means to be a neighborhood.”

“It’s a tremendous pleasure to tour America with Carlo Rotella, whose essays take us from a Slovenian-Cleveland-style polka club in Chicago, to a ‘jazz fantasy camp’ in upstate New York, to the Las Vegas mall where Floyd Mayweather Jr. is getting a pedicure. Full of sharp dialogue, true to the ideals of craft and adventure, this essay collection reads like a great road novel.”

“Carlo Rotella is an old-fashioned journalist in the best sense of the term: he doesn’t just visit the people and places he writes about, he inhabits them. His articles and essays are models of empathy and understanding. And because he is a man who appreciates craft— the craft of boxers, fencers, musicians, and clowns—his own work always strikes the right celebratory note, the one that ends with just the slightest inflection of melancholy—which, unparadoxically, is what makes his work a pleasure to read.”

“Like other greats of the nonfiction craft—Joan Didion, John Jeremiah Sullivan—Rotella’s own personality eventually comes through.”

“Just when you think it’s all been written, a good writer takes a shining new look at an old subject and breathes life into it… Rotella has preserved the blow-by-blow and the grandeur of another age but has somehow expanded the ring to include his own generation’s proclivities and sensibility.”

“A wonderful book… Cut Time is aimed at everyone, even readers who can’t imagine that they could ever learn anything from men slugging it out in a ring. They can.”

“Reading his words is a pleasure, but absorbing their underlying force, and the dark things they sometimes suggest, can be bruising… Rotella shows that he’s not just an excellent reporter, keen writer and an acute observer, he’s a hell of a teacher to boot.”

“One of the best boxing books ever written.”

“Carlo Rotella might or might not be good with his hands, but to borrow Lyle Lovett’s phrase, he has ‘lights in his fingers.’ Rotella has written a well-crafted book–a meditation, really–on the fate of industrial culture in a postindustrial age.”

“This is a brilliant study, warm and frequently thrilling, of an inspired combination of subjects. Postindustrial American urban culture has found its great poet-theorist in Carlo Rotella.”

“Rotella powerfully brings the reader to the core of . . . socio-economic transitions in a manner that is almost palpable in its ability to connect the reader to any one of his subjects. Rotella held me, taught me, opened my eyes to an appreciation of new ways of seeing. The writing is electric, the broader conceptual framework is rich and complex, and his touch is deft throughout the book.”

“Original, engrossing discussion of emerging class, race, and gender transformations in post-industrial urban America. . . . Serious readers will appreciate his enthusiasm, sharp observations, and the overall narrative’s meandering wit.”

“A wonderful book, a wholly authoritative mapping of urban literature in the United States from the industrial city of the 1930s and 1940s to the post-industrial landscape of the 1960s. Fascinating and pathbreaking.”

“This is an important book, which immediately establishes itself as authoritative.”

“Rotella does an extraordinary job of describing both the ideology of urban planning and its actual realization in the built environment, and he shows how cultural constructions of meaning simultaneously reflect and inform social reality.”

“One of the best sports books of 2017.”

“Gritty and smart, this championship card replaces Liebling’s The Sweet Science for me because it comes from the inside and the sweat tastes real.”

“By approaching its subject at inventive, even unprecedented angles, this superb collection manages something novel regarding this inexhaustible topic, ‘the sport all others aspire to.’ . . . These essays can’t help but exceed their topic to skillfully and intelligently treat violence and courage and human will and craft and the ultimate inevitable decay we all face. The result simultaneously instructs, disturbs, and maybe even emboldens.”

“The insightful and innovative true tales of The Bittersweet Science leave one wanting more. It’s a terrific read for all who think they already know boxing, as well as for those fascinated to learn more about it.”