Sign-In
Cart
The Stuff What Actually Is
Paperback
General FictionHistorical Fiction
Publisher Price: $19.95
ISBN13: 9781964721484
Publisher: GFB
Published: Jun 3 2025
Pages: 304
Weight: 0.78
Height: 0.68 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
The moving story of a young British immigrant who, drafted after Pearl Harbor and stationed in the Jim Crow South, begins to question basic assumptions about his adoptive country-as well as himself.
It's 1942. Mervyn Gower, a college dropout and wannabe boxer, works as a locker boy at the Beverly Hills YMCA but trains under Mugsy Levine-part-time boxing mentor and full-time local gangster-at an LA gym closer to home. Despite Gower's desire to fit in, he is forced to compete as The Welsh Kid and sees being drafted as his chance to prove himself a real American.
Assigned to a segregated Army base in the South, Gower finds a very different America from the one portrayed in the movies. It's punctuated with Colored Only signs, civilians forced into internment camps, and better treatment of German POWs than of Black US soldiers.
Inspired by real-life stories and backed by author J. A. Nunn's thorough research, The Stuff What Actually Is explores the inner life of a young fighter as he recognizes the inequities he encounters, one bout at a time.
Also from
Nunn, J. A.
Also in
General Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Anniversaries, Volume 2: From a Year in the Life of Gesine Cresspahl, April 1968-August 1968
Johnson, Uwe
Paperback
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
Selected Writings: Robert Musil: Young Torless, Three Women, the Perfecting of a Love, and Other Writings
Musil, Robert
Agee, Joel
Paperback
Before Gatsby: The First Twenty-Six Stories
Bruccoli, Matthew J.
Baughman, Judith
Fitzgerald, F. Scott
Paperback