This richly researched, sympathetic yet unsparing portrait of a controversial figure for whom the personal and the political dramatically fused could not come at a more appropriate time in our beleaguered American history ... As Muhammad Ali’s life was an epic of a life so Ali: A Life is an epic of a biography. Much in its pages will be familiar to those with some knowledge of boxing but even the familiar may be glimpsed from a new perspective in Eig’s fluent prose; for pages in succession its narrative reads like a novel—a suspenseful novel with a cast of vivid characters who prevail through decades and who help to define the singular individual who was both a brilliantly innovative, incomparably charismatic heavyweight boxer and a public figure whose iconic significance shifted radically through the decades as in an unlikely fairy tale in which the most despised athlete in American history becomes, by the 21st century, the most beloved athlete in American history.
...[a] stunning biography ... Eig is far too precise of a biographer to draw conclusions based on conjecture. He lets the details of the story speak for themselves — and he has a lot of details, and a lot of stories. Ali is a big, fat, entertaining and illuminating read ... What makes Eig’s book stand out is its broad scope, its detailed reportage and its lively, cinematic writing ... Although race is a crucial theme, it is boxing that is at the heart of this book. The fight scenes are beautifully wrought — vivid and detailed, rich with description and metaphor...Eig’s research into the effects of head trauma make those scenes particularly excruciating to read. If Ali did not understand the damage that was being done, the reader most certainly does.
…[a] stunning new biography of the champ … Eig recounts the champ's major bouts in dizzying detail. Even readers who don't care for boxing will be drawn in by his descriptions of the fights, ‘the cigarette and cigar smoke draping the air, the shouts, the moans, the voices screaming for holy blood’ … Ali's life was more complex than most other sports figures, and Eig's brilliant, exhaustive book is the biography the champ deserves: a beautiful portrait of a man whose name will never be forgotten, who carried a torch for equality and justice, and lit a fire that will never go out.
Jonathan Eig’s Ali: A Life is the first comprehensive biography worthy of this titanic figure. The author of acclaimed books on Lou Gehrig and Jackie Robinson, Eig weaves together Ali’s athletic feats, cultural significance and personal journey. Fortified by hundreds of revealing interviews, Ali vigorously narrates the story of the man who transformed the landscape of race and sports ... Eig also paints Ali’s bouts with vivid detail and captivating sweep ... But Eig might have placed Ali into a wider arc of African American history. The book glosses over the rapid transformations wrought by the civil rights and Black Power movements, which framed the public understanding of Ali, including the white anxiety and black love ... Ali stirs together the sweet and the spicy, the gifts and the failings, the charm and the rage, the grace and the greed, the pride and the ego. Together, they made Ali the transcendent athlete of his age.
Eig’s book, a deeply researched, simply styled study, makes a game effort at telling the whole story, leaving out the judgment while presenting many colorful vignettes of the man’s life, uncensored ... Eig’s biography, assembled from hundreds of source materials and interviews with dozens of Ali’s long-quiet associates, avoids simply revisiting the surface of his famous refusal to be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, or his on-again-off-again claim that the races would be happier if they were segregated. Instead, the standout stories are those of the shy, sensitive, perceptive kid from Louisville who, with a natural love for human beings in his heart, was given an early and rough introduction to the racial realities of America ... Eig’s book is a fine read on the great boxer’s life, taking him on as he was and always seeking the truth that hits closest to bone.
...an appropriately outsized—and first-rate—biography ... Eig does a fine job of covering all the bases, and though the book is occasionally overwritten, it’s only out of enthusiasm for his undeniably great subject, about whom the author is now working with Ken Burns to develop a documentary. An exemplary life of an exemplary man who, despite a few missteps, deserves to be remembered long into the future.
…[a] relentless, image-altering biography … Though replete with tales of race, religion, war protest, sex, marital turmoil and skulduggery, this book is, more than anything else, an indictment of boxing. The cumulative damage of Ali’s boxing career is a terrible and haunting thing to read about, and it becomes all the more so when you remind yourself that Mr. Eig’s subject is one of American sports’ most beloved figures, not some luckless tomato can … Never does it seem that the resourceful Mr. Eig set out to bring Ali’s image tumbling down. He paints a vivid picture of this complex Samaritan.
Jonathan Eig’s masterful new biography of the champ is both captivating and highly relevant to the current discussions on race in America ...comprehensive research included more than 500 interviews with more than 200 people from the boxer’s life, and material from recently discovered audio interviews with Ali ... Eig’s boxing descriptions are taut and lively, wisely eschewing the purple prose of the literary set who have written about the sport... Muhammad Ali was one of the most compelling figures in the 20th century, and Eig does ample justice to capturing his extraordinary and enduring legacy.
In his riveting new biography, Ali: A Life, author Jonathan Eig digs deep into both the mercurial boxing champ and his paradoxical country to make sense of this epic drama … As Mr. Eig smartly shows, the complexity of Ali’s attitude toward induction [to the military] is a metaphor for his journey from loquacious showman to global civic icon. Over time, Ali’s initially selfish reasons for refusing induction gave way to a religion-based stand principled enough to hold up in the U.S. Supreme Court … Mr. Eig vividly paints the young Ali, a man raised in the Jim Crow South, his physical beauty and unprecedented brashness … If any single person could contain such contradictions, it was Muhammad Ali, and if anyone can explicate them, it’s Jonathan Eig.
Eig has produced a thorough overview of a complex person, but he is no boxing authority and his descriptions of bouts and technique are merely adequate. He also offers a rather thin argument that Ali was suffering from pugilistic dementia as early as age 28 ... Eig industriously traces how a brash kid evolved into a countercultural hero and, in his later years, became a trembling, muted icon. Sharp quotations and expert pacing make the 600-plus pages light on their feet but ultimately Eig’s studied equanimity never quite captures exactly why Muhammad Ali was indeed 'the Greatest.'