( 11 reviews )
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Posted: Mar 25 2009
This book has been "bathroom reading for me." It was given to me over the holidays and I have slowly read it. Fortunately or unfortunately, I have a stomach flu and spent a lot of time in the "john" yesterday night. Well, I finished the book, and most people did not need the extra information about the context of reading. This book is motivational. Ali was a great man, we would disagree about religion but we agree on how to treat people. His stories are interesting and powerful. It is a reflection of his life with poems and short accounts of major events. One of the most touching accounts is the time he carried the torch into the Olympics. He has a huge heart and a desire to do what is right. This is a good little book for some light reading. This book was very touching.
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Posted: Nov 26 2008
I grew up with Muhammad Ali and only knew of his character from what the press was showing us. I have a new found respect and gratitude for reading about the true person behind the persona. Muhammad Ali is truly a spiritual being and a role model for all.
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( 2 of 2 found this review helpful ) Posted: May 9 2008
This beautiful summary of Ali's life is not just a gift to his kids but to all of America as well. In his own simple words, Ali shares with us his greatest triumphs and his worse agonies. It is all done with the same Ali, verve, upbeat spirit, and of course with smatterings of his homespun poetry. It is a superb collection of wisdom and witticisms that greatly enriches all who read them. The arc of the amplitude of his life is breathtakingly wide in scope. And I am fortunate in having had the good luck to have met him on three different occasions, and to have been touched by his style, grace and confidence on many others. All have been memorable experiences for me personally. Some of the things he shares in this short volume come as a surprise even to me, one who kept up with his career almost religiously. For instance, I never knew that the Nation of Islam was against his refusal to go to Vietnam, and that he was expelled from the sect as a result of it? Nor did I know that he was refused a seat in a Louisville restaurant in 1960 while holding both the key to the city and while wearing his Olympic Gold Medal? Nor did I even know that he had actually denounced Malcolm X and "sided" with Elijah Muhammad in the feud between his two spiritual leaders: the feud that ended in Malcolm's death? Nor did I know that he was a Sunni Moslem? Or that he had thrown his Olympic Gold Medal into the Ohio River? Although the book only reflects it indirectly, Ali is proof, that, whether black or white, we are all still part of the "American racial holocaust": A part of the Big American racial lie. The truths that Ali could not reveal directly in this book is common knowledge to all the world, that: America hated Ali the same way it hated Dr. Martin Luther King, not for his arrogance, nor for his refusal to go to the war, but for being a proud black warrior in a "white only world." And then he used his pride and his boxing skills to take over the stage of America's drama of heroism, formerly reserved for white males only (or occasionally for others designated American "sanctioned Heroes," of which Ali clearly was not one). America's highly touted religion freedoms ceased to apply when this "proud black warrior" at center stage in the American drama, where he was not supposed to be, chose to exercise that freedom to, first become a Muslim, and then to refuse to go to war to kill others at the U.S. behest. For exercising his religious freedom in these two ways, many interpreted both of his actions as the supreme insult to the nation's sensibilities. As a result, America tried to take away everything he had: his livelihood, his title, his fame, his money, the best years of his youth, his pride, his confidence: I know, I visited him in his home in Chicago during the Christmas of 1969 when he was in the deepest part of his "in country exile." But even though they took away everything else, they could not take away his pride or his confidence or his belief in his new found God. America was most gleeful about dragging him off center stage, but even off center stage, his quiet strength grew to even greater proportions than his physical strength: Ali became larger than life outside the ring, not within it. When America saw that his quiet strength was greater than his pugilistic prowess, they knew they could not defeat him, in or out of the ring. Thus, there was no choice but to capitulate: After the Supreme Court Decision, America "ate crow" but they did not apologize for stealing the best four years of his youth, or taking away his title. They just cheered wildly when Joe Frazier beat him. This humbled him enough for white America to embrace him, but still without apologies. It was done as much to continue making money off of him, and so that they could now claim him as their own, and then be able to bask in his larger than life aura, as to redeem America's much embarrassed soul. Because America's past is so ugly, it is very much the American way to pretend that nothing at all has ever happened in the past. The "bad Ali tape" was simply erased from the collective cultural memory banks: no apologies necessary, the same as it was done for Dr. Martin Luther King: one day King was a villain, the next a martyr, the next day a hero? Such is the nature of true "Black" heroes in America: Muhammad Ali, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Charley Parker, Sugar Ray Robinson, Malcolm X, Paul Roberson, WEB Du Bois, Eldridge Cleaver, Stokley Carmichael, Fanny Lou Hammer and on and on. But the racist American system can never "own" Ali, no matter how many Olympic torches they allow him to carry around the stadium, because he beat the American system in the same way he beat all of his opponents in the ring: fair and square. He looked it in the eye and refused to buckle. And this book proves that Ali won, this, his most important bout, with the strength of his character
