Longreads

The fading spotlight of one of the biggest icons in boxing history:

"If King wants to reflect on the past during this, the evening of his career, he only has to look around his offices at Don King Productions, where he has surrounded himself not only with memorabilia, but also with the same people who helped him rise to the top. Dana Jamison, King's vice-president of operations, has worked with King for 27 years. His personal photographer has been around for two decades. Of all the people I met associated with Don King, only Tavoris Cloud was under the age of 40. King's productions feel even older and more out of date. While waiting for him to show up back at the headquarters of Don King Productions, I squeezed into a long-since-abandoned cubicle, careful not to disturb an ancient Brother typewriter and a stack of press releases and legal documents from the late '90s. In the lobby, there was an old movie theater popcorn machine stamped with Don King's emblem. One of his employees told me that in the '90s, that machine had pumped the smell of fresh popcorn into the vents of the building. He couldn't remember the last time it had been turned on. Out back in a warehouse behind the offices, more than 20,000 square feet of King's possessions — mostly ornate furniture and towering bronze statues of lions — gathered dust along with seven of King's cars. Earlier this month, Jessica Lussenhop of the Riverfront Times published an excellent article about King's ongoing legal battle with St. Louis boxer Ryan Coyne, a conflict that started in November 2012. If you go to donking.com today, you will find a story titled 'Undefeated National Champion Boxer Ryan Coyne Meets Cardinals Three-Time MVP Albert Pujols.'"

So the Great Depression runs through Little House in the Big Woods like a big three-hearted river.

Perhaps most striking, however, is that the book's central theme is made most conspicuous not through the events and details described in its pages but by the things that aren't there.

There's no Depression in the Big Woods. There's no sign that the Civil War was less than a decade in the nation's rearview (aside from one minor character, Uncle George, who ran off to be a drummer boy and came home "wild"). There are no banks. There isn't even a cash economy: A description of the family's visit to the store in town depicts a dazzling oasis of consumerism, but Pa pays for the calico and the sugar in trade, with bear and wolf pelts. There's no government. In fact, a government would seem superfluous. No need for police or courts, because everyone gets along. The Ingallses have everything they need thanks to Pa's seemingly limitless frontiersman skills and Ma's "Scottish ingenuity" on the domestic front.

Tonight, in a modest brick row house in the sleepy city of Carthage, beyond the Ozark Mountains and the mines of southwest Missouri, past the poultry plants and churches along Interstate 44 and U.S. 71, down the block from the Jasper County courthouse and historic town square, a five-year-old boy is going to bed.

Chances are the boy is unaware of the battery of lawyers debating his future. He's probably oblivious to the national immigration debates he has stirred, the newspaper headlines he has generated, the two school-district employees whose firings are directly linked to his circumstances. He very likely has no idea that the Guatemalan Embassy in Washington, D.C., is in his corner, or that a lone circuit court judge will decide his fate this winter.