Winner of the 2018
PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing
Winner of The Times
Sports Biography of the Year
“As Muhammad Ali’s
life was an epic of a life so Ali: A Life is an epic of a biography .
. . pages in succession its narrative reads like a novel—a
suspenseful novel with a cast of vivid characters.” – Joyce Carol
Oates, New York Times Book Review
Muhammad Ali was
born Cassius Clay in racially segregated Louisville, Kentucky, the
son of a sign painter and a housekeeper. He went on to become a
heavyweight boxer with a dazzling mix of power and speed, a warrior
for racial pride, a comedian, a preacher, a poet, a draft resister,
an actor, and a lover. Millions hated him when he changed his
religion, changed his name, and refused to fight in the Vietnam War.
He fought his way back, winning hearts, but at great cost.
Jonathan Eig, hailed
by Ken Burns as one of America’s master storytellers, sheds
important new light on Ali’s politics, religion, personal life, and
neurological condition through unprecedented access to all the key
people in Ali’s life, more than 500 interviews and thousands of
pages of previously unreleased FBI and Justice Department files and
audiotaped interviews from the 1960s. Ali: A Life is a story about
America, about race, about a brutal sport, and about a courageous man
who shook up the world.