Thus are boxing writers only those possessing the most sophisticated perceptual gifts. With his new book Cut Time, Carlo Rotella assures his place among them. Subtitled, “An Education at the Fights,” this splendid work is both an authoritative scholarly exploration of the fight game’s conceptual complexities and an engaging, accessible encounter with the boxing world at street level. There is an education in that, too, since education worthy of the name knows its limitations and does not explain things away.”Rotella correctly perceives that boxing, like writing, is also an act of the imagination, driven by turbulent forces and projected onto the blank white space of experience. Withal, Cut Time is a virtuosic performance, a fearless plunge into paradox, contradiction, parody and pain, arrving finally at a synthesis, a luminous moment in which boxing becomes a metaphor for the world we surrender to gain knowledge of ourselves.