Ken Burns calls Jonathan Eig a "master storyteller." Eig is the author of five books, two of them New York Times best sellers.His new biography is Ali: A Life.
From Eig's Q&A with Deborah Kalb:
Q: What did the research involve for this book, and what type of cooperation did you receive from his relatives and friends?Learn more about the book and author at Jonathan Eig's website.
A: I interviewed more than 200 people, dug through Ali’s old business records, found court files showing that Ali’s grandfather was a convicted murderer, listened to old audiotaped interviews with Ali from the 1960s, got the FBI to release case files on Ali, did original research counting every punch of Ali’s career, and conducted a study with speech scientists at Arizona State University to measure the effect of all those punches on Ali’s speech rate.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. This was more than four years of work. I poured everything I had into this. Ali’s second and third wives sat for multiple long interviews. His fourth and final wife coached me and answered a few questions but declined to do a long session.
Some of his kids cooperated, some didn’t. Almost all...[read on]
The Page 99 Test: Get Capone.
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My Book, The Movie: Ali: A Life.
--Marshal Zeringue