THE BRAVE by Robert Lipsyte (HarperCollins:...

THE BRAVE by Robert Lipsyte (HarperCollins: $14.95; 195 pp.). Celebrated sportswriter and champion young-adult novelist Robert Lipsyte returns to the ring with this sequel to his highly praised 1967 novel about boxing, “The Contender,” and proves that he is still a winner . . . by a knockout. And so, these many years later, is that other contender, Albert Brooks, the hero of the previous novel. Brooks is now a New York City Police sergeant, fighting crime in the no-holds-barred ring of Times Square. There he meets 17-year-old Sonny Bear and recognizes in this would-be professional boxer the same kind of at-risk adolescent he himself once was. Sonny is a classic outsider. Half-Moscandaga Indian and half-white, he belongs in neither world. His real fight is to find his own identity, to be somebody. Though he doesn’t realize it at first, he will be helped enormously in this fight by having Brooks in his corner. The ring, of course, has always been a useful metaphor for the harshness of the world, and boxing for each human fight to survive in it. Sonny is no cliche, however, but a unique individual whose story is vividly told by Lipsyte, who pulls no punches in showing us the mean streets that Sonny must travel from the reservation to the ring.