Ali: A Life
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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 Aliβs inner circle.
""Finally Muhammad Ali has a biography as big, complex, and memorable as the man himself.""Β βT.J. Stiles, author ofΒ Custer's TrialsΒ andΒ The First TycoonΒ
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 Americaβs master storytellers, sheds important new light on Aliβs politics, religion, personal life, and neurological condition through unprecedented access to all the key people in Aliβs 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.
βAs Muhammad Aliβs 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 novelββa suspenseful novel with a cast of vivid characters.β ββ Joyce Carol Oates, New York Times Book Review
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JONATHAN EIG is the author of five critically acclaimed books, including the Pulitzer Prize winner King: A Life. He was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Monsey, New York. Eig 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. He lives in Chicago, IL.
