By Thomas Hauser. Muhammad Ali has attained mythical stature in American life. But in recent years Ali has been subjected to an image makeover by corporate America as it seeks to homogenize the electrifying nature of his persona. Thomas Hauser argues that there has been a deliberate distortion of what Ali believed, said, and stood for, and that making Ali more presentable for ad agencies by sanitizing his legacy is a disservice to history and to Ali himself. Sport Media Publishing (2005), English, Hardcover: 224 pages.

From the Inside Flap: "The Lost Legacy of Muhammad Ali" is Thomas Hauser's companion volume to his seminal 1991 work, "Muhammad Ali: His Life and Times," a biography hailed as "incomparable" by The New York Times,"a considerable achievement" by The Wall Street Journal, and "simply magnificent" by the Boston Globe. Fourteen years later, Hauser believes that Ali remains a transcendental figure in American life. But in recent years, Ali has been packaged and repackaged and the reasons for his importance, as well as the electrifying nature of his persona, have been obscured in a fog of revisionism. 

"The Lost legacy of Muhammad Ali" strips away the revisionism to reveal, once again, the true Ali. Hauser has assembled all his writing about Ali, other than his definitive biography, and added several essays published here for the first time. He recounts Ali's triumphant ascent to near-mythical stature by virtue of his achievements, both inside the ring and out.