A Bloody Canvas: The Mike McTigue Story (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781856355360)

The most bizarre world championship fight in boxing history was staged on St. Patrick's Day 1923, in war-torn Dublin. The winner in the ring, Mike McTigue, went on to run with gunmen, gangsters and racketeers in Jazz Age New York. A Bloody Canvas: The Mike McTigue Story tells the story of how Michael Francis McTigue left Kilnamona, Co. Clare, to seek fame and fortune in the United States, only for circumstances to bring him back to Dublin where he would win one of the strangest world title fights in boxing history. Set partly against the background of the Irish Civil War, it also tells of a bitterly divided people who managed to set aside their differences for twenty rounds of boxing before the guns started firing and the mines started exploding once more. But primarily, A Bloody Canvas is a biography. It tells how an ageing journeyman fighter found himself to be the right Irishman, in the right place at the right time. This is the saga of an underdog boxer laced with wrenching danger and a panoramic sense of life from late eighteenth-century rural Ireland to the Civil War, to the heady days of the Jazz Age in New York and the desperation of the Great Depression.

Author: Andrew Gallimore
ISBN-10: 1856355365
ISBN-13: 9781856355360
Publisher: Mercier Press
Language: English
Published: 02/01/2007
Pages: 362
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.85lbs
Size: 8.30h x 5.20w x 1.10d

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 09/01/2008 pg. 31