Beginning with the pre-Ali days of boxing and its two archetypes, Floyd Patterson (the good black heavyweight) and Sonny Liston (the bad black heavyweight), Remnick deftly sets the stage for the emergence of a heavyweight champion the likes of which the world had never seen: a three-dimensional, Technicolor showman, fighter and minister of Islam, a man who talked almost as well as he fought. You'd think there wouldn't be much left to say about a living icon like Muhammad Ali, yet David Remnick imbues King of the World with all the freshness and vitality this legendary fighter displayed in his prime. "synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title. A master storyteller at the height of his powers, David Remnick has written a book worthy of America's most dynamic modern hero. King of the World takes us back to the days when his life was a series of battles, inside the ring and out. It is a study of the rise of the black voice in the American consciousness and a look at how the media creates its heroes - Cassius Clay began as a 'light-hitting loudmouth' before becoming gradually canonized by the American press and public as Muhammad Ali.
Remnick then describes Clay's 1964 fight with Liston, which even his own people thought Clay couldn't win, and takes us through to 1967 when Ali refused the military draft to Vietnam. The book begins in September 1962 with the fight between Floyd Patterson and Sonny Liston, providing a remarkable sociological backdrop to Ali's entrance on the boxing scene. Most of all, King of the World does justice to the speed, grace, courage, humor, and ebullience of one of the greatest athletes and irresistibly dynamic personalities of our time.King of the World is an unforgettable account of Muhammad Ali's rise and self-creation, told by a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, places Ali in a heritage of great American originals.ĭavid Remnick concentrates on Ali's early career, when he was still fighting as Cassius Clay. He gives us empathetic portraits of wisecracking sportswriters and bone-breaking mobsters of the baleful Liston and the haunted Patterson of an audacious Norman Mailer and an enigmatic Malcolm X. In charting Ali's rise from the gyms of Louisville, Kentucky, to his epochal fights against Liston and Floyd Patterson, Remnick creates a canvas of unparalleled richness.
No one has captured Ali-and the era that he exhilarated and sometimes infuriated-with greater vibrancy, drama, and astuteness than David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lenin's Tomb (and editor of The New Yorker).
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