The Rumble in the Jungle

Starred review from April 15, 2019
This relatively brief book almost functions as a dual biography of the two fascinating men of the subtitle, Ali and Foreman, the combatants in the legendary 1974 heavyweight championship in Zaire known as the Rumble in the Jungle. While acknowledging the outsize proportions of Ali as a cultural touchstone, Erenberg delivers a remarkably balanced account of both fighters in and out of the ring, before and after the fight. With the advantage of 45 years of perspective on the event and its sociopolitical context, Erenberg brings new insight to the fight's complex racial dimension, and he deftly handles the fighters' different takes on the Vietnam War. He effectively captures the overwrought rhetoric surrounding the fight, and his position as something other than a boxing insider (he is professor emeritus in history at Loyola University in Chicago) brings a notably fresh interpretation to Ali's upset victory. Though relevant and knowing, the middle sections of the book?on global television and Congolese politics?are a bit less compelling. The fight is the thing, and when Erenberg gets back to it, he scores heavily. In a crowded field, this is a strong and surprising entry, right up there with Norman Mailer's The Fight (1975).(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)