King of the World

There were mythic sports figures before him — Jack Johnson, Babe Ruth, Joe Louis, Joe DiMaggio — but when Cassius Clay burst onto the boxing scene in the 1950s, he broke the mold. He changed the world of sports and went on to change the world itself. David Remick's King of the World is a sweeping biography that follows Ali from his unlikely start as an amateur boxer in Louisville through his meteoric rise to heavyweight champion, his defiant refusal to be drafted into Vietnam during the height of the Cold War, and his transformation into one of the most outspoken political voices of his generation. Remick's prose captures both the dazzling showmanship of the man who became Muhammad Ali and the quiet personal costs behind the public persona.