The Longest Fight : In the Ring with Joe Gans, Boxing's First African American Champion

Joe Gans was the welterweight champion of the world - smart, trim, handsome, with a revered right hook.

He was the first black man in Baltimore to own a car, and the saloon he owned was the first place in the city where blacks and whites mingled socially. And yet Gans - as interesting a sports hero as America has produced - is largely unknown today. "The Longest Fight" will change that. The book centres on an epic boxing match held in September 1906 in Goldfield, Nevada: Gans versus the racist fighter Oscar "Battling" Nelson, who was known to bite opponents.

The promoter, the young Tex Rickard, played up the fight as a race war.

A new rail line brought tens of thousands of spectators from San Francisco.

Dozens of reporters came to file blow-by-blow accounts to their home cities. And a pair of entrepreneurs filmed the fight to show in theatres, closed-circuit style.

William Gildea uses Gans' achievements to give us a deeply affecting account of what it was like to be an African-American sports champion in the early twentieth century. And through it all Gans was a man of wit, style, and courage - an unforgettable precursor to Satchel Paige, Jim Thorpe, Jesse Owens, and Jackie Robinson.