No boxing book collection is complete without the classic, award-winning, Dark Trade: Lost in Boxing. With this updated edition, brought to the United States for the first time, the original cover art by fine artist Amanda Kelley, depicting James Lights Out Toney, a central figure in the book’s gripping narrative, makes this a gorgeous and essential addition to any boxing fan’s collection.

McRae brings to the highly charged, obsessive world of professional boxing a novelist’s eye and ear for revealing detail and convincingly recalled dialogue. This is an impassioned book. –Joyce Carol Oates, LA Times
At the heart of this engaging and eloquent work…is McRae and his intriguing attempts to explain his ‘seemingly illogical but enduring love’ of boxing. –Kirkus Reviews Dark Trade: Lost in Boxing, by Donald McRae, award-winning author of twelve non-fiction books and staff writer for The Guardian, is widely considered of one of the best boxing books all time.
This is a new edition, released in the United States for the first time, that includes a new chapter by the author, plus a stunning cover that features a painting of boxer James Toney by noted boxing artist Amanda Kelley. There is no other sport like boxing. Over twenty years ago, Donald McRae set out across the United States and his adopted home, Britain, to find deeper meaning in the brutal trade that had transfixed him since he was a young man. The result is a stunning chronicle that captures not only McRae’s compelling personal journey through the world of professional prizefighting, but also the stories of some of its biggest names in boxing–James Toney, Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, Oscar De La Hoya, Naseem Hamed, Roy Jones, Jr., and others.
Singular in his ability to uncover the emotional forces that drive men to get into the ring, McRae brilliantly exposes the hopes and fears and obsessions of these legendary fighters, while revealing some of his own along the way. What he shares with them most, he comes to realize, is that he is hopelessly, and willingly, lost in boxing.

Table of Contents
Introduction
1 The Baddest Man
2 The Force
3 This Is Boxing, Baby
4 Oscar’s Night
5 The King and the Prince
6 Guns and Fathers
7 Looking on Darkness
8 Death and the Man
9 The Cinderella Men
10 The Soldier Boy
11 Nothing Is Forever
12 The Beacon
13 The Bite
14 Fading Away
15 Still Lost in Boxing
Acknowledgments