Overview

"NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Winner of the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing Winner of The Times Sports Biography of the Year The definitive biography of an American icon, from a best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author with unique access to Ali's inner circle. """"Finally Muhammad Ali has a biography as big, complex, and memorable as the man himself."""" --T.J. Stiles, author of Custer's Trials and The First Tycoon 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. ""As Muhammad Ali's life was an epic of a life so Ali: A Life is an epic of a biography . . . for 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"

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Reviews

"""[A] relentless, image-altering biography."" -- ""Wall Street Journal"" ""An appropriately outsized--and first-rate--biography."" -- ""Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"" ""An epic of a biography...Reads like a novel--a suspenseful novel with a cast of vivid characters."" -- ""New York Times Book Review"" ""An unabashed admirer of heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali takes on the challenge of separating man from myth...Eig skillfully utilizes resources unavailable to previous authors, allowing him to present other aspects of Ali,"" -- ""Library Journal (starred review)"" ""Narrator Kevin R. Free delivers this work in a relaxed, upbeat tone. He dabbles in some character voices but focuses his energy on varying his reading."" -- ""AudioFile"""

Author Information

Jonathan Eig is the New York Times bestselling author of five critically acclaimed books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner King: A Life. He is a former staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, and he remains a contributing writer there. He has written for the New York Times, the New Yorker, Esquire, the Washington Post, and other publications. He has appeared on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and in two Ken Burns films for PBS. He also worked with Burns to develop a documentary on Muhammad Ali that aired in 2021. Kevin R. Free is an audiobook narrator and the winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and several AudioFile best narrations of the year selections. Known for his work with young-adult novels, he has read titles by Rick Riordan, Walter Dean Myers, and Joe Haldeman. In 2011 he was named a Best Voice in Young Adult and Fantasy from AudioFile magazine for his narration of Myers' The Cruisers: Checkmate.

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