The Last Bell

Reviews

‘Don McRae has spent fifty years in thrall to the fight game. The Last Bell is at once a moving memoir and McRae's swansong as a boxing writer--a fine, vivid, and searching tribute to a sport than can be as lethal as it is uplifting.’  ‘As with the sport itself, boxing writing is about so much more than physical combat – it’s about the dark drama of life and death in their totality. That Donald McRae understands this implicitly makes him one of the very best writers working today. I’ll read anything he turns his hand to.’   'Every new book about boxing by Donald McRae is cause for celebration. Nobody does it better.' 'Donald McRae enjoys what boxing fans will hope is not one last successful run in the sport, chronicling it with the passion, depth and colour that only he can.

The Last Bell is a personal look at the sport through a human lens and at the business of boxing with a critical eye and it shows how different both parts are.

McRae proves, once again, that he is one of the great sportswriters of his time while reminding boxing fans how lucky they are to have him.' ‘If Dark Trade was about one man wanting to find out what it is to fight and how it feels to lose, The Last Bell is about a man who is now familiar with these things through personal experience using boxing as a reminder that he is not alone in feeling the emotions attached to them.  
McRae’s eyes may be wearier and slightly narrower now, but when you see modern-day boxing through them there is a surprising and refreshing clarity to be found. It is a clarity hard to find anywhere else these days and McRae, 29 years after Dark Trade, continues to write about boxing with an elegance, intelligence and maturity and again delivers the definitive text on where we are today. The Last Bell is a book plenty of people need to read but only one person could have written.’ 
  ‘The Last Bell is an unforgettable book. Its portraiture is akin to that of the finest novelists, and its reflections on life, death, loss and decency-under-duress are profound and moving. McRae unveils the grim realities of the industrialised brutality of boxing. He shows us the vain and cruel who seek to profiteer from and corrupt the sport, but he shows us also, with what amounts to brotherly love, those who act with daring, respect and honour. This book, which is laced through with bravery and tenderness, goes to the depths of life and death and back. Boxing, sport even, is fortunate to have a laureate such as this.’  ‘About life, death and boxing, McRae beautifully melds those constituent parts, then transcends them, to recount a profound journey through the human experience in a way that only a writer of his immense talent and humanity could. Exceptional and unique. I can’t recommend it enough.’  ‘Nobody writes about boxing like Don McRae. But with The Last Bell he has written a book that moves beyond just boxing and grapples instead with what it truly means to fight.  It is a book about knowing when to bite down and keep swinging, about knowing when to throw in the towel, a book about loss and defeat, and how we might, in the final reckoning, face those inevitabilities with a kind of a redeeming grace.’  ‘A beautiful, gripping, always surprising book about sport, life, boxing, men, women, art, ageing, family and why we get lost in things. Don McRae is a champion of sports writing. This book is a relentlessly absorbing mix of detail, humour, sadness, wisdom and colour from a life lived in that world.’   ‘The Last Bell is heart-pounding and enraging, and yet somehow tender, too, full of the grace and wisdom that comes from decades of observing and reflecting on boxing (and sport, competition, spectacle, in general). Reading about Patrick Day’s devastating final bout, I was pacing my office. Thrilling and raw, this is sport writing at its best, but also much more than that. McRae crafts an urgent and unforgettable meditation on risk, loss, and our enduring hunger to find meaning in struggle: a subject that captivates and brings together readers and writers of all kinds.’  Expand reviews