Word: remnick
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...announced last week, two were selected by Imus and two by listeners, who voted for their favorites online. Imus' top pick was Freedomland by novelist Richard Price, who will take home $100,000. The other three winners (Pillar of Fire by Taylor Branch, King of the World by David Remnick and My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki) were each awarded $50,000, a pile of loot five times as great as that pocketed by the winner of that other prize. Elitism costs...
...KING OF THE WORLD: THE RISE OF MUHAMMAD ALI A book about a boxer would seem to lack, well, social significance. Not true here. David Remnick takes off from the 1964 bout in which a brash Cassius Clay dethroned the menacing heavyweight champ Sonny Liston. That fight changed Clay into Muhammad Ali and created a new sort of black athlete. Remnick's account of the aftershocks packs a punch...
Although the powers that be, from the President to Frank Sinatra, prayed for another saint, the public was happy either way. Hating a Liston was just as much fun as respecting a Patterson, and just as painful for the victim-challenger. In brilliant sketches of the archetypes, Remnick suggests Liston was trapped in his badness--people wanted him to be a bum forever--while Patterson lived in constant fear of not being good enough...
...thespian training he had picked up in the rings of Louisville to go so thoroughly crazy that his vital signs went crazy too, and Liston was scared out of his mind. The worst mistake you can make in writing about Ali is to leave out the boxing, but Remnick's account of the fight that followed is so vivid that one can imagine Ali saying, "How'd you get inside my head...
...Malcolm X, whom he regrets having deserted. "Malcolm was a very, very great man," he tells the author in his now halting speech. Odessa Clay's sweetness has manifestly overwhelmed Cassius Clay Sr.'s blather, and there is nothing left about their son not to like. At which point Remnick trips, for the first and only time, on his way out the door by tacking on a routine death-of-boxing editorial that is simply not big enough for the rich, reverberant world he has just given us. Fortunately, it comes much too late to harm a most excellent book...