George Kimball

Name: George Kimball

    Author of “FOUR KINGS: Leonard, Hagler, Hearns, Duran and the Last Great Era of Boxing”
    • Winner of the Nat Fleischer Award for Excellence in Boxing Journalism from BWAA, 1985.
    • Longtime columnist for the Boston Herald.
    • Currently writes columns for The Irish Times, ESPN.com, and Boxing Digest.
    • Freelance writer, broadcaster and occasional book critic (for The Irish Times and The Boston Phoenix.
  • http://www.georgekimball.com/

Favorite Book: “On the Road” by Jack Kerouac

"I’m a pretty voracious reader, and might go through two or three books a week. My tastes are pretty eclectic, ranging from fiction (Richard Price’s “Lush Life,” Dennis Lehane’s “The Given Day,” and pretty much anything by Larry McMurtry) to poetry (“Gunslinger” by Edward Dorn) to journalism collections (A.J. Liebling, Pete Hamill, John Schulian, Pete Dexter, Hugh McIlvanney), history, and biography. My favorite boxing books are a couple that deal with the seamy underside of the sport – Budd Schulberg’s “The Harder They Fall” and Leonard Gardner’s “Fat City” -- a truly great, underappreciated novel. (“Fat City” was published 40 years ago. It was Gardner’s first novel, and also his last; he’s never written another one.) But if you’re going to pin me down to one book, it would have to come from among those I liked so much that I’ve read them over and over again. J.P. Donleavy’s “The Ginger Man” and Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” would be among those, but Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” has been a constant presence for most of my adult life. I first read it in my teens, and I read it in my twenties, in my thirties, forties, and fifties, and when the ‘Original Scroll’ version came out a couple of years ago, I read it again in my sixties."

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