"If Fightclub were not a novel (and then a movie), it would be a mere footnote in the life of James LaFond, whose real-life account of punches and bruises, injuries and defeats, and even the occasional (usually Pyrrhic) victory reads with the gripping intensity and insight we’ve come to expect from his other works. LaFond doesn’t have to fantasize in a work of fiction about what being hit, kicked, stabbed, beaten (and even shot!) feels like. He’s lived it for the past 35 years, and writes about it with good-natured humor, humility, philosophic insight, and excitement. It’s enough to make you want to go out and trade punches with someone just so you know what it’s like to really feel something in this too-often muffled, insulated, and suffocating world. One thing you can always say about pain, 'You know it’s real.'

"LaFond says that fighting is not a physical thing, but a mental one, and his account of over 3 decades of battles gives the reader a sense of what the poet must have meant who said, “There are only three professions for a man: the priest, the poet, and the warrior. Everyone else just has a job.

"But LaFond is cheating, for in writing so eloquently about the life of a warrior he is threatening to tread on the territory of the poet. And one might even suspect, when he speaks of “a life worth living” and of the dynamic that saved the flickering spirit of someone who had known only existence that he is trying out for the job of High Priest of the Fighting Life as well."

-David Carl, March 8, 2013