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	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
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Memoirs

THE DOMINO DIARIES

Brin-Jonathan Butler

My Decade Boxing with Olympic Champions and Chasing Hemingway's Ghost in the Last Days of Castro's Cuba

A memoir and separate digital short by filmmaker and amateur boxer Brin-Jonathan Butler, who was training in Cuba when he stumbled upon the story of “amateur boxing’s greatest living boxer,” a Cuban two-time Olympic Gold medalist named Guillermo Rigondeaux. After meeting the boxer, Butler began filming a documentary that revealed the deep ties between boxing, politics, and Cuban culture. The Domino Diaries is Butler’s cautionary examination of Cuban-American relations as seen through the lens of boxing.

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Book Published 2015-06-09 by Picador

Comments

Trailer of Brin-Jonathan Butler's film 'Split Decision', showing Boxers' tough choices about leaving Cuba Read more...

There's nothing in the world like America's grasping, oversexed, blundering, blustery and oft-deadly relationship with Cuba. Charting this fever-dream, this illness of love and fear, requires a poet's ear, an outsider's eye, a boxer's clinical cruelty, and an unhealthy attraction to breakage. I give you Brin-Jonathan Butler. Anyone can -- and, especially now, will -- tell you what to think about Cuba. But no one can show you better how the place makes you feel.

In THE DOMINO DIARIES, Brin-Jonathan Butler writes like a heavyweight champion: Tyson's power, Ali's elegance, and Joe Louis's humanity, all of them are on display here. Writing, like boxing, is a solitary endeavor, one that gets displayed nakedly, for better or worse, to the world. This engrossing work not only looks at the sweeping world, it delves into the darkness of being alone with your aloneness. A total knockout.

The project also includes a digital short which has been getting a lot of attention. The documentary won the "Spirit Award" at December's Shadow Box Film Festival in New York. The Daily Beast ran a feature detailing much of the story behind the scenes of both the documentary and Domino Diaries. Read more...

Interview with author on how the new Cuba-U.S. scenario creates great expectations in American boxing community Read more...

Amazing what a difference it makes when someone writes on a theme with a love which is entwined with their life. And on top of that, writes it well.