"Everything that he has done
was against this country."Ā
Joe Frazier on Muhammad Ali
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Part man, part myth, and all American, Muhammad Ali is history's most beloved, most revered athlete. But though he was "The Greatest" inside the ring, outside he was a hulking mass of contradictions.Ā
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This book is the first comprehensive, pull-no-punches account of America's least likely icon. Jack Cashill explores the changing mores and racial dynamics of the sixties alongside Ali's epic battles in the ring. "What Ali did, great or otherwise, was to channel the spirit of his age. . . . He captured the ethos of that decade all too well. It wasn't pretty. I was there, and I know what I saw."
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CashillĀ reveals how Elijah Muhammad seduced Ali--and how that seduction spelled the betrayal of Dr. King's dream, the death of Malcolm X, the humiliation of Joe Frazier, the rise of Don King, and the tragic undoing of Mike Tyson--and proves that:Ā
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Ali was an unapologetic sexist and unabashed racist, calling for the lynching of interracial couples and an American apartheid as late as 1975.Ā
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Ali routinely denigrated black heroes who did not share his point of view, including Joe Louis, Jackie Robinson, Thurgood Marshall, and especially Joe Frazier.
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Ali shamelessly courted some of the most brutal dictators on the planet: Qadaffi, Idi Amin, Papa Doc Duvalier, Nkrumah, Mobutu, and Ferdinand Marcos.
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With unusual sympathy and unflinching insight, Cashill assesses Ali's boxing conquests and political influence. He shows how the very figure who could have brought America's diverse people together when it mattered, instead tore them apart.
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Jack Cashill has written and directed The Holocaust through Our Own Eyes, The Soul of the West and the Emmy-Award winning The Royal Years among other documentaries for regional PBS and national cable channels. Cashill has a Ph.D. in American studies from Purdue and has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Fortune, Weekly Standard, WorldNetDaily, and Ingram's, where he serves as executive editor. He is also the author of First Strike, Ron Brown's Body, and Hoodwinked: How Intellectual Hucksters Have Hijacked American Culture.