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. 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.

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). Six rounds later Ali was not only the new world heavyweight boxing champion: He was 'a new kind of black man' who would shortly transform America's racial politics, its popular culture, and its notions of heroism. On the night in 1964 that Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) stepped into the ring with Sonny Liston, he was widely regarded as an irritating freak who danced and talked way too much. The bestselling biography of Muhammad Ali-with an Introduction by Salman Rushdie

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