Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A compelling social history told through sport, March 3, 2006
For those of us who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, The Sound and Fury is a wondrous re-telling of the period through the lives of two unlikely partners, Howard Cosell and Muhammad Ali. It is not a boxing book. It is a work of social history, responsibly reported and told. Dave Kindred's superior writing and interviewing have made a book that should last for many years. The tales of Cosell's and Ali's lives, each up-from-bootstraps, and their accidental friendship, will impress even the most jaded sports fans and grownups.
I could not stop reading this once I began.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
May your hands always be busy, April 2, 2006
May your feet always be swift,
May you have a strong foundation
When the winds of changes shift.
May your heart always be joyful,
May your song always be sung,
May you stay forever young,
Forever young, forever young,
May you stay forever young.
Bob Dylan's song, Forever Young, serves as one of Dave Kindred's melodic themes in his wonderful book, "Sound and Fury". Sound and Fury is a biography of Muhammad Ali, Howard Cosell, and the relationship between them.
Sound and Fury carries the reader along as Muhammad Ali, born Cassius Marcellus Clay, and Howard Cosell, born Howard William Cohen, burst like stars upon the public's imagination in the 1960s and takes them through their respective heydays and then to their inevitable fading away.
Kindred, a sportswriter for close to forty years, began his newspaper career at The Louisville Courier in Muhammad Ali's hometown. He covered Ali since his earliest days, his glory days. It also seems he was one of the few print reporters that Howard Cosell respected and liked. They stayed in close touch with each other until Cosell's death. But, although it is quite clear that Kindred admires and respects both men, and with feelings toward Ali that are powerfully affectionate, even loving, Sound and Fury is no hagiography.
The book takes us quickly through Ali and Cosell's early days. As Kindred alternates between Ali and Cosell's struggle for success in their respective fields one can see the similarities between the two, particularly a single-minded determination to achieve their goals. Ali and Cosell came together in the public imagination after Ali's conversion to the Nation of Islam and his decision to refuse induction into the Army after being (finally) classified as draft-eligible. Ali's famous line "I ain't got nothing against them Viet Cong" made him something of a marked man. Ali was stripped of his title, denied the right to box, and convicted of draft evasion, a conviction later overturned by the Supreme Court. Cosell was one of the few to stand up Ali and it was this stand that helped make Cosell as controversial as Ali. Kindred does an excellent job covering the evolution of the symbiotic relationship between the two men. Kindred points out that Cosell was always very careful never to endorse Ali's views about religion or the war in Vietnam. Rather, Cosell always made it very clear that he argued only that Ali had a fundamental right to hold those opinions and no one had the right to deprive him of a livelihood simply because he held unpopular views.
Kindred, for all his respect and admiration for both men, is quick to point out those instances in which Ali and Cosell acted badly. Ali's treatment of his original religious mentor, Malcolm X, after Malcolm was tossed from the Nation of Islam and then killed is covered as is his brutal and unfair characterization of Joe Frazier (calling him less than a man and an Uncle Tom when in fact Frazier had grown up in greater poverty and experienced more racism than Ali had). Kindred does not hesitate to take Cosell to task for his vaunted insecurity and his callous treatment of those around him, particularly print journalists whom he considered to be inferior beings. Kindred's coverage of Cosell's stormy tenure on Monday Night Football is both informative and balanced.
Kindred is at his finest in describing the twilight of each man's career, Ali's descent into a Parkinson's syndrome induced shell of his former self and Cosell's withdrawal into retirement, seclusion after the death of his beloved wife Emmy, and eventual death. Kindred comes close to capturing that which cannot truly be captured: the ineffable feeling of loss that someone experiences when time has passed them by. This feeling must be particularly intense in the case of those who once were the center of worldwide (Ali) and national (Cosell) attention.
That indescribable notion is set out in the second melodic theme that marks "Sound and Fury". Cosell's favorite poem, one he recited at length with or without prompting, was Keats' Ode to a Nightingale and one which Kindred cites often in his book. If Dylan's Forever Young serves as a theme for Ali and Cosell's early days, Keats' Ode serves as a mournful and extraordinarily apt coda.
Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last gray hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Dave Kindred has written a wonderful account of Ali and Cosell and their lives spent at the intersection of sports and the media. It will satisfy sports fans and non sports fans alike. It was a great read.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Cosell and Ali-Media darlings, July 11, 2006
Sound and Fury (14 hours, 11 cds, unabridged, Blackstone Audio) is a duel biography of Howard Cosell and Mohammed Ali.
Sport writer Dave Kindred knew both men, he has written a bio that transcends his knowledge of both men. His text is an honest, no hold barred , warts and all biography. When a third person (like Kindred) writes a biography, he tends to put his personal touches with his own bias, this book is NOT that.The book showed an unlikely partnership created by media hype.
In the audio narrative hands of Dick Hill, this audio project seems more like a docudrama in its scope. Hill's narrative voice takes on verbal personas of Cosell and Ali, without mocking them. His talent has grown from the days at Brilliance Audio.
Sound and Fury is an amazing production . . . you won't forget it audio, long after you heard it
Bennet Pomerantz AUDIOWORLD
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