Books: Ali Memories and Carver Boyd

Occasionally in this space we'll showcase the writing in new boxing books by BWAA members. Today is a two-fer. First, Tom Hauser and Bart Barry have teamed up to create an exclusive title for Barnes & Noble, The Legend of Muhammad Ali, a coffee table book that contains some fine writing and removable reproductions of Ali memorabilia. Here's a little teaser from Chapter 8:

In one understated elegant gesture, Futch turned toward the referee and unfurled the fingers of his left hand. He would not allow the fight to continue.

Across the ring, Ali realized that the carnage was over. He stood up, lowered his head, and lifted his right glove in the air, more in relief than triumph. Then he allowed his body to slowly ooze to the canvas. Later, Muhammad would say that the fight had been 'the closest thing to death I know of.'

Hauser also has published a new boxing novel, Waiting for Carver Boyd, which Jerry Izenberg at Secondsout.com calls "better than anything he has written before, no matter how well he wrote it." Here's an appetizer:

That’s when I saw a woman about my age on the sidewalk walking toward me.

She saw me the same moment that I saw her.

She was as beautiful as any woman who ever walked on the face of the earth. Tall with long auburn hair and a body that I won’t try to describe because words wouldn’t do it justice.

Her face was as dreamlike as the rest of her.

The distance between us narrowed and there was a flash of recognition in her eyes.

“You’re the fighter,” she said.