Books like Brawler by Neil Connelly

A young woman must uncover the secrets of her family and loved ones to prevent the end of the world in an exciting fantasy story.

Alfred Brooks, a high‑school dropout in Harlem, turns to Donatelli’s Gym to escape drug‑addicted friends and street threats, discovering that perseverance in boxing can lift an African‑American youth toward a better future.

In his acclaimed national bestseller "A Fighter's Heart," Sheridan takes readers with him as he steps through the ropes into the dangerous world of professional fighting. Here, Sheridan does for the brain what his first book does for the body.

A 15‑year‑old prisoner named Johnny learns to box and then strives to earn a living as a fighter in late‑nineteenth‑century New York City.

A high‑schooler’s life changes after a car crash leaves her disfigured; she discovers that true identity lies beyond beauty, learning self‑acceptance, forgiveness, and the power of friendship.

Ruben and his brother Cameron take up boxing to lift their family in debt and prove themselves, but soon their reactions inside the ring diverge wildly.

A Polish Jewish boy, Moshe Wisniak, survives the Holocaust by using his strength, wit, and luck in concentration camps.

In 1974, in Kinshasa, Zaïre, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman squared off on a five‑million‑dollar card while Norman Mailer delivered a keen, energetic, and culturally resonant commentary on the bout.

When a fistfight broke out between the Houston Rockets and the Los Angeles Lakers one night in 1977, All-Star Rudy Tomjanovich raced to break it up. He was met by Kermit Washington, a good player with a great reputation, and by an astonishingly ferocious punch, a single blow that has reverberated in both men's lives ever since. With his unerring insight into the deeper truths of professional sports, John Feinstein reveals what really happened that night and traces the remarkable trajectories of both men's careers before and after the punch. Through this one cataclysmic event he casts a light on the NBA's darkest secrets, exploring violence, race, and the true price men pay when they choose a career and a life in sports. ..

The War of the Fists is a study of seventeenth-century worker culture in the city of Venice, focusing on the mock battles, or battagliole, which the town's two popular factions waged on public bridges. These "little battles" were partly festive battle, partly sport, and partly thinly veiled plebeian mayhem: they could involve as many as a thousand fighters on each side and attracted crowds of thirty thousand or more. Their importance in the city's plebeian life makes bridge battles an extremely valuable point of entry for exploring structures of Venetian popular culture, a task which Robert Davis attempts at four levels: the social geography of Venetian factionalism; the combat itself, and its relationship to social culture; the festive world which grew up around the encounters; and the response of Venice's patrician state to this largely uncontrollable worker celebration. From the study there emerges a popular world often surprisingly rich: with plebeian honor, status, and neighborhood loyalties that flourished in parallel and sometimes in competition with a patrician domination of urban life at the city's geographic center. In a sense, these encounters represented popular culture "in the making," as Venice's marginal classes fashioned out of apparent chaos the ritual structures they needed to satisfy social needs that otherwise went unmet in their aristocratic state. As a microhistory that uses Venetian bridge battles as a key to understanding many facets of popular society, The War of the Fists will be of interest to social historians and historical anthropologists, as well as historians of urban society, gender, workers, sports, social geography, popular art and culture, and the absolutist state.

Seventeen‑year‑old Carr “the Raptor” Luka ascends to zeroboxing fame, only to uncover a secret that threatens his career and the fragile balance between interplanetary worlds.