Word: alie
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...great deal: 300 custom-tailored suits, a string of glamourous women and powerful friends in show business and politics. He drove two Citroën-Maseratis and four Mercedes. Ghetto kids, said a black police detective, "think he's the greatest thing since Muhammad Ali," an idol to emulate. Prosecutors saw Barnes as a public menace to put in prison-and found it maddeningly difficult to get him headed there. Since 1973, Nicky Barnes had been arrested for homicide, bribery, drug dealing and possession of dangerous weapons. But none of the charges stuck. Impressed by his apparent ability...
Although the Moore fight is Plimpton's feat of participatory journalism for the book, it is mainly preoccupied with Muhammad Ali, from his defeat of Sonny Liston in Miami in 1964 when Plimpton first met him, to his successful regaining of the heavyweight title against George Foreman in Zaire...
Plimpton makes Ali understandable as few of his chroniclers have done before. His relationships to the Black Muslims, his opponents, and his fans are all rendered clearer by Plimpton's insights. A most illuminating anecdote is Ali's description of the Near Room, an imaginary place Ali found himself looking into when things went badly in the ring...
...vision like Ali's Near Room might discourage any fighter facing opposition the likes of George Foreman and Joe Frazier...
...seems to be aiming at a readership more cultivated, perhaps, than the TV audience Paper Lion hit; readers who get their sports from the New York Times if not the New Yorker, who care about Plimpton's reactions to Hunter Thompson and Malcolm X as well as to Muhammad Ali--readers who, in fact, may more closely resemble the real Plimpton, affluent and Harvard educated, than they do his self-deprecating Mr. Average Joe persona...