A ring and an interesting proposal

Without Apology

Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight

Leah Hager Cohen

Random House: 208 pp., $24.95

In the spring of 2001, a timid, physically fragile and morbidly sensitive writer named Leah Hager Cohen walked into the Somerville Boxing Club in Massachusetts, where a former Golden Gloves champ named Raphaella Johnson was waiting for her in the ring. Cohen had first wandered into this world filled with Lucia Rijker wannabes the previous fall, when she'd heard that Johnson was training a batch of lower-income girls in the art of the sweet science. After several months hovering on the sidelines and taking notes for a book, she decided that she wanted to know what it felt like to hit someone herself. So that day she wrapped her hands, put on the gloves. She slipped through the ropes to confront her teacher and opponent, a squat, muscled flyweight who had once weathered a broken nose to win a silver medal at the 1997 Women's National Championships.

The two women put their heads down and began to swing.

In "Without Apology: Girls, Women, and the Desire to Fight," Cohen writes of her interactions with Johnson and the four adolescent girls she observed that year. Nikki, Jacinta, Candida and Josefina are all intelligent, though somewhat psychologically busted, kids whose parents allow them to apprentice with the trainer so they'll learn how to "wield power" in an intimidating updated female socialization ritual that has only the barest resemblance to my own personal memories of pining after adventure badges in the Brownies.

Indeed, "Without Apology" has a radically ambitious bildungsroman in mind, as its tale of these girls' training is supposed to evoke the kind of passion endured by the convulsively sobbing audiences of the current Oscar hopeful "Million Dollar Baby." In Clint Eastwood's boxing pic, Maggie, played by Hilary Swank, triumphs under the gruff tutelage of Eastwood's trainer Frankie (until, that is, she suffers the traditional fate of the professionally successful female character in Hollywood and is brutally destroyed).