Books: Middleweight & Friend

THE VIOLENT WEDDING (255 pp.]—Robert Lowry—Doubleday ($3).

"You just never saw a great fighter," her sportswriter friend tells Laine Brendan. "I'm going to take you to see one tonight." That night, in Madison Square Garden, Laine Brendan sees Middleweight Paris ("Baby") James for the first time. For Baby, the fight is just a routine affair, won by a knockout. But Laine's emotions come to life as she watches the Negro boxer "fighting his fight with a savage grace . . . like the black angel of death himself." After the fight, Laine can't get the black angel out of her mind; she...

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