Redemption Song: Muhammad Ali and the Spirit of the Sixties
Mike Marqusee
(Verso, £10)
Buy it at BOL

Dear me, another book about Muhammad Ali. How many is that now? About 50-odd, still in print, I'd say. Boxing, writing's exact opposite, attracts quite a few writers, perhaps for that very reason. Not me, though. And, not knowing or caring much about boxing, I didn't know or care much about Muhammad Ali, who as far as I was concerned was someone who introduced a tiresome vein of self-proclamation into sport ("I am the greatest", etc) and is now, as one of "sport's elder statesmen", someone about whom you are not allowed to entertain heretical thoughts.

So I was prepared for a book that I would have to read through the fog of my own indifference. But it's not quite like that. Marqusee is perfectly aware that the world and his dog has written a book about Ali, not to mention a book about the 1960s, but here he gives us the radical Ali, the friend (and then ex-friend) of Malcolm X, the potent symbol of Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam, the man whom The New York Times refused, for years, to call anything but Cassius Clay - or simply "Clay", in contradistinction to that newspaper's fusty correctitude when dealing with white people.

The New York Times does not emerge from this book with any honour. Indeed, I had no idea how despicable its pronouncements during the 1960s could be. Getting Ali's name right was a serious matter, as Ernie Terrell found to his cost in 1967, when he called him "Clay" during a pre-match press conference. "Uncle Tom! What's my name?" shouted Ali, in the ring, as he pummelled Terrell to bits. It was, Terrell presumably learned, a rhetorical question, of a kind. (Terrell, to his credit, never complained.)

Ali learned a different kind of rhetoric when he said this: "I ain't got no quarrel with them Vietcong." The poison that was heaped on his head, by just about everyone, is almost unimaginable now (imagine the bleats of outrage in Wednesday's gutter press about a few paint-throwers in Whitehall, multiplied in ferocity by a factor of 20).

It is, in retrospect, surprising that he managed to get through the decade alive. The Terrell fight was pretty much the last straw: one commentator called it "a kind of lynching", an unbelievable phrase to have used; another writer "almost" yearned for the return of the mobsters to the ring. "Rarely," says Marqusee, "has the hideous hierarchy of boxing's values been made so explicit."

A look at this book might be good for those who see the 1960s as some kind of loopy love-fest, and play an internal montage of scrawny-bearded runts with flowers painted on their faces whenever the term is mentioned. Marqusee makes it clear what it was to have to struggle for even the most basic reforms; people were not safe when they stood up against the orthodoxy.

There is an aside that deals with the assassination of Patrice Lumumba, reminding you not only that being a democratically elected leader did not make you safe; and also that while the Eisenhower administration ordered Lumumba's death, it was the Kennedy administration that executed the order. So we should not shed too many tears over Kennedy's own end, and understand Malcolm X's "chickens coming home to roost" remark shortly afterwards.

This, then, is not just Ali's story, but the story of a continuing struggle for freedom, and one that was at its sharpest 35 years ago. Marqusee does his subject great justice. And as for Ali - well, what do you know? He really was the greatest.