Redemption Song
Subtitle: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties
Publisher: Verso
Published: June 1, 1999
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 310
ISBN-13: 9781859847176
Subjects: Biography: sport; Boxing; Cultural studies; POLITICS & GOVERNMENT; c 1960 to c 1970; Nineteen sixties; U.S. History - 1960s; United States - 20th Century/60s; Sports & Recreation; Biography / Autobiography; Sociology; USA; Sports - General; Biography; United States - 20th Century; 1942-; Ali, Muhammad,; Boxers (Sports); United States
Description: In Redemption Song, Mike Marqusee takes the reader on an eye-opening excursion through the politics and culture of the 1960s, using the magisterial but often contradictory career of "the Greatest" as his guiding thread. His portrait of the boxer provides a springboard for an investigation of the themes of black representation, popular culture, the Black Atlantic, and the wool and warp of exuberant individualism and mass protest that came to typify the 1960s. Marqusee's story is populated by figures such as Paul Robeson and Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis and Kwame Nkrumah.

It includes fresh examinations of Ali's friend, the singer Sam Cooke, who was a secret supporter of the Nation, and of Bob Dylan, whose retreat from protest to introspection provides an illuminating counterpoint to Ali's own journey. Marqusee also recreates in detail Ali's associations with Martin Luther King and above all with Malcolm X, a friendship that was torn apart by the paranoia and ruthlessness of Elijah Muhammad.