Overview
There had been mythic sports figures before Cassius Clay, but when he burst upon the sports scene in the 1950s, he broke the mold. Those were the years when boxing and boxers were at the mercy of the mob and the whim of the sportswriters. If you wanted a shot at a title, you did it their way.
Young Clay did it his way - with little more than an Olympic gold medal to his credit, he danced into Sonny Liston's baleful view and provoked the terrifying champ into accepting him as his next challenger. The rest is history.
Muhammad Ali has become a mythic hero, an American icon, a self-invented legend. As both a mirror and a molder of his times, Ali became the most recognizable face on the planet, a key figure in the cultural battles of the times. This is the story of his self-creation, and his rise to glory, told by a master storyteller.
Synopsis
There had been mythic sports figures before Cassius Clay, but when he burst upon the sports scene in the 1950s, he broke the mold. Those were the years when boxing and boxers were at the mercy of the mob and the whim of the sportswriters. If you wanted a shot at a title, you did it their way. Young Clay did it his way - with little more than an Olympic gold medal to his credit, he danced into Sonny Liston's baleful view and provoked the terrifying champ into accepting him as his next challenger. The rest is history. Muhammad Ali has become a mythic hero, an American icon, a self-invented legend. As both a mirror and a molder of his times, Ali became the most recognizable face on the planet, a key figure in the cultural battles of the times. This is the story of his self-creation, and his rise to glory, told by a master storyteller.Editorials
Budd Schulberg
Here's a fine book to remind us again that Ali was born with a gift for living (and believing) in a world without end.-- The New York Times Book Review
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt
It has been an amazing storyand Mr. Remnick captures the best of it in King of the World —The New York TimesHal Hinson
In the preface to his collection The Devil Problem and Other True Stories, David Remnick writes: "Reporters are interested above all ... in stories." If so, then Remnick has lived a charmed life. In terms of sheer drama and significance, no story in our collective lifetime compares to the collapse of the Soviet Union, which Remnick covered for the Washington Post and used as the basis of his Pulitzer Prize-winning book, Lenin's Tomb. With his latest book, King of the World, the author's subject is not only the most heroic sports figure of the 20th century, but also, as Remnick puts it, "one of the most compelling and electric American figures of the age."
The result is a book that's strong in its grasp of social forces but also sensitive in attention to human detail. What drew Remnick -- who was recently named editor of the New YorkerKing of the World is a book about a boxer, not a book about boxing. Remnick is most interested in what happens outside the ring. When Remnick begins his story, Muhammad Ali is still Cassius Clay, and must share the stage with two of his most fearsome opponents, Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. Patterson, Remnick writes, was the Good Negro, "an approachable and strangely fearful man, a deferential champion of civil rights, integration, and Christian decency," while Liston, "a veteran of the penitentiary system before he came to the ring," reluctantly took on the role of the Bad Negro. Each represented a stereotype Ali would ultimately transcend. "I had to prove you could be a new kind of black man," Ali tells the author. "I had to show that to the world."
Remnick's deft staging and insight make familiar events seem fresh in the retelling. Less well-traveled territory -- Ali's relationship with the Nation of Islam, his friendship with (and ultimate repudiation of) Malcolm X and the transition from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali -- is also handled well. Remnick only follows Ali's story through the champion's 1967 refusal to enter the armed forces. ("Man," he famously said, "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong.") He saves his most impassioned writing for the fight Ali wages against the American military. As a result of his stand, Ali was sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. However, the real cost for his refusal was something like $10 million in purses and endorsements. What was worse, Remnick writes, it also cost him his title. "His title, which he had coveted from the time he was twelve."
Visiting the 54-year-old Ali on his Michigan farm, Remnick finds that the three-time heavyweight champion of the world thinks about death "all the time now." Suffering severely from Parkinson's, Ali has been robbed of his most powerful weapon -- his voice. And yet he has not been silenced. Of the few remaining icons of the '60s, Remnick observes, Ali is by far the most adored. "He hit people for a living, and, yet, by middle age he would be a symbol not merely of courage, but of love, of decency, even a kind of wisdom." With King of the World, David Remnick has written a great book about Muhammad Ali -- a book that is worthy of its subject. -- Salon
Library Journal
Born Cassius Clay in segregated Louisville, KY, in 1942, Muhammad Ali became "The Greatest" boxer and world champion, admired for decency, courage, and now for his debilities from thousands of head injuries and the onset of Parkinson's disease. We follow blow-by-blow reports of his first three momentous fights; his conversion to Islam; his friendship with and later rejection of Malcom X; the draft scandal that robbed him of three crucial years and probably $10 million; and, briefly, his four marriages. Dick Hill, always first-rate, reads this well-recorded set. King of the World will circulate well in popular biography collections.--Gordon Blackwell, Eastchester, NYL.S. Klepp
. . .Intelligent, informed, enlightened. . .-- Entertainment Weekly