Reaching the top in any sport requires a long, hard climb. But when you start with the baggage of years of family dysfunction and incarceration in a hellish mental hospital, the climb is especially steep. Yet even with such weights to carry, Anissa Zamarron won not one, but two, world championships in women's boxing. Her story, as dramatically intense as the Clint Eastwood film Million Dollar Baby, is one of tremendous courage and determination to overcome the odds against her as a Latina and as a woman working through mental illness and addiction—a fight in which Zamarron has been as powerful and successful as she has been in the boxing ring.

In this compelling biography, acclaimed author W. K. "Kip" Stratton collaborates with Zamarron to tell the story of her unlikely rise to the pinnacle of women's boxing. With searing honesty, Zamarron describes how the chaotic breakup of her childhood family caused her to develop "demons" that drove her to aggressive behavior in school, an addiction to self-destructive habits, including cutting, and eventually to a corrupt for-profit mental hospital in which she spent eighteen months tied to a bed. She explains how boxing became her salvation as an adult; she learned how to turn her anger and aggression into motivation to train hard and excel at her sport, not only becoming the first woman to fight as a professional in a sanctioned fight in New York, but also fighting more ten-round fights than any other woman in history. A gripping account of Zamarron's 2005 upset win over Maribel Zurita to claim her second world championship caps the book.

Honorable Mention, Carr P. Collins Award for Best Book of Nonfiction, 2006

Grover Lewis was one of the defining voices of the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s. His wry, acutely observed, fluently written essays for Rolling Stone and the Village Voice set a standard for other writers of the time, including Hunter S. Thompson, Joe Eszterhas, Timothy Ferris, Chet Flippo, and Tim Cahill, who said of Lewis, "He was the best of us." Pioneering the "on location" reportage that has become a fixture of features about moviemaking and live music, Lewis cut through the celebrity hype and captured the real spirit of the counterculture, including its artificiality and surprising banality. Even today, his articles on Woody Guthrie, the Allman Brothers, the Rolling Stones concert at Altamont, directors Sam Peckinpah and John Huston, and the filming of The Last Picture Show and One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest remain some of the finest writing ever done on popular culture.

To introduce Grover Lewis to a new generation of readers and collect his best work under one cover, this anthology contains articles he wrote for Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Playboy, Texas Monthly, and New West, as well as excerpts from his unfinished novel The Code of the West and his incomplete memoir Goodbye If You Call That Gone and poems from the volume I'll Be There in the Morning If I Live. Jan Reid and W. K. Stratton have selected and arranged the material around themes that preoccupied Lewis throughout his life—movies, music, and loss. The editors' biographical introduction, the foreword by Dave Hickey, and a remembrance by Robert Draper discuss how Lewis's early struggles to escape his working-class, anti-intellectual Texas roots for the world of ideas in books and movies made him a natural proponent of the counterculture that he chronicled so brilliantly. They also pay tribute to Lewis's groundbreaking talent as a stylist, whose unique voice deserves to be more widely known by today's readers.