num_pages: 326
description: 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. 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.        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). 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. 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. 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.
language: English
title: King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero
titlecomplete: King of the World: Muhammad Ali and the Rise of an American Hero
characters: Muhammad Ali
genres: Sports, American, History, African American, Memoir, Biography Memoir, Politics, The United States Of America, Biography, Nonfiction
ratings_count: 4447
awards: awardedAt: 915177600000
name: Independent Publisher Book Award (IPPY)
category: Audio Nonfiction (Finalist), awardedAt: 883641600000
name: National Book Critics Circle Award
category: Biography/Autobiography
publisher: Vintage