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Title: Ghosts of Manila: The Fateful Blood Feud Between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier by Mark Kram ISBN: 0060195576 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: 22 May, 2001 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.47
Rating: 5
Summary: THIS BOOK PROVES NO ONE DOES BOXING BETTER THAN MARK KRAM
Comment: You know how in the movie "Pulp Fiction" Uma Thurman says there are tow kind of people in this world, Beatles people and Elvis people? Really, it should be like this: Muhammed Ali people and Joe Frazier people. Their trilogy was epic, and the third fight, in Manila, was easily the single greatest heavyweight fight of the 20th Century (though it quite doesn't measure up to the 1995 super middleweight title bout between Nigel Benn and Gerald McClellan). Mark Kram's book perfectly captures the two men: Ali as the immature, mean-spirited oaf who wanted nothing more than to have attention paid to him; Frazier as the simple yet proud warrior who would readily die defending his honor. It is clear that Kram holds a great deal of respect for Ali but refuses to bow to the media's popular imagination that has deified Ali. Did Frazier deserve the sick wrath he encountered? Kram says absolutely not. This book is the stuff of journalistic legend. Just read it for yourself, whether you're an Ali person or a Frazier person. I am most emphatically in the latter category.
Rating: 2
Summary: Kram's bitter two cents
Comment: Though the book is important for putting some blotches on the Ali sainthood, overall I think the book is the jealous rantings of a bitter man. From this book, and from interviews I've seen with the author, it's clear Kram hates Ali. But more than a personal dislike for Ali, Kram seems thorouglhy jealous of the popular adulation for the man. The book is an effort to so discredit Ali that others will share Kram's disdain. In short, this is Kram's axe to grind. Kram gives Ali's remarkable talents grudging acknowledgment and has absolutely no sympathy for the man. (If Kram was political, he would probably be a fanatical Clinton-hater.) So what terrible wrongs did Ali commit to deserve such treatment by Kram? Personal vanity, making fun of Joe Frazier, and not defying the Black Muslims on the draft (Incidentially Kram, the BMs murdered Malcolm X, do you think that might have influenced Ali's decision?). Valid points yes but not worth spending a good part of your time writing a book about. There is more acrimony is this book than in several volumes I've read about Hitler or Stalin. In conclusion, reading this book is very difficult: not b/c of the "truths' it reveals about Ali but b/c bile doesn't taste good.
Rating: 2
Summary: The 900-pound Gorilla takes on Manila
Comment: "Ghosts of Manila" is an overwrought, angry 230-age opinion piece, which seeks to "explode myths" about Muhammad Ali, and set the historical record straight. From a rhetorical point of view, it achieves this goal nearly as well as Liston delivered against Muhammad Ali in Lewiston, Maine in 1965.
This is not the way the book should have been. The idea is brilliant -- after Ali-Frazier III, Frazier was out of boxing within months (and never won another bout), and Ali never again hurt so much as a flea. A book about the boxers in decline (Frazier didn't amount to much afterwards, and Ali was a physical ruin, a wordless, spectral icon) could have moved mountains of emotion. Certainly books about boxers reach their subjects far more effectively than books about other sports, and Mark Kram could have penned an all-time classic.
"Manila" dwells most on the fighters' creation: Frazier as blue-collar champion for a moment, Ali as a mindless puppet of the overhyped Nation of Islam movement. Seeking to rehabilitate Frazier's reputation in the public eye, Kram doesn't really make much of a case for Frazier as one of boxing's great heavyweights, and regrettably doesn't make him very interesting in the present day, either.
The rest is a phillipic against Ali, whom the author knew as a magazine writer, and didn't admire much. Conversations between author and champ are reprinted verbatim, and are never polite. The words carefully chosen to describe Ali are belittling and derogatory. Kram can't praise him as a boxer, either -- after two paragraphs praising Ali's ring style, he introduces us to an Italian novelist who explains that, really, Ali was artless and free of drama in the squared circle. Well, that helps. There was a point of view I'd never considered before.
Kram touches other vendettas as well. A one-page summary of Howard Cosell finds the time to use words and phrases like "amoeba" and "small-time eviction lawyer". Bryant Gumbel is summarily dismissed in three paragraphs. It's the most cynical book I've read in years.
"Ghosts of Manila" is a noteworthy rant, a logical attack on th way we see Ali -- saving its heaviest ammunition, an interview with Ali's "fifth wife" and a forgotten daughter, for the very end. The book finally becomes fresh when we get to Manila, a great fight about which little has been written. But the road to Manila is far from an interesting one.
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Title: The Devil and Sonny Liston by Nick Tosches ISBN: 0316897469 Publisher: Back Bay Books Pub. Date: 2001 List Price(USD): $14.95 |
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Title: Smokin' Joe: The Autobiography of a Heavyweight Champion of the World, Smokin' Joe Frazier by Joe Frazier, Phil Berger ISBN: 002860847X Publisher: Hungry Minds, Inc Pub. Date: 1996 List Price(USD): $23.95 |
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Title: The Fight: Norman Mailer by Norman Mailer ISBN: 0375700382 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 1997 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: MUHAMMAD ALI: HIS LIFE AND TIMES by Thomas Hauser ISBN: 0671779710 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 1992 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Facing Ali: 15 Fighters / 15 Stories by Stephen Brunt ISBN: 1585748293 Publisher: The Lyons Press Pub. Date: 2003 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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