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At Home with Muhammad Ali
At Home with Muhammad Ali
Oct 7, 2024 1:32 PM

Author:Hana Yasmeen Ali

At Home with Muhammad Ali

From the daughter of Muhammad Ali comes an intimate portrait of the heavyweight boxing champion and a final love letter from a daughter to her father.

Through audio journals, love letters and cherished memories, Ali's daughter Hana tells the story of a very typical and yet fully-unique family, the rise and fall of her parent’s marriage and the struggles they faced as a family surrounding Ali’s loss to Larry Holmes in 1981.

With the decline of Ali’s voice, his recordings are important to history as they are to his personal legacy. At Home with Muhammad Ali offers a candid look at a man who was trying to find his purpose in the world as he realized he was coming to the end of his lucrative sporting career, all the while trying to balance fatherhood and his worldly and political obligations. Additionally, Hana tells of the everyday adventures that the family experienced around the house—with visitors like Michael Jackson and Clint Eastwood dropping by. And for the first time, Hana’s mother Veronica will share her memories of the 12-year relationship with Muhammad.

At Home with Muhammad Ali is a candid and revealing portrait of a legend, a man admired and respected as the greatest sporting icon of our age.

Reviews

This book is an amazing insight into an incredible man

—— Lorraine Kelly

To millions of fans his reputation went beyond the boxing ring. In At Home With Muhammad Ali, Hana Ali tells what it was like to grow up with the most legendary name in sport. [The book] vividly evokes an Ali who is barely recognisable as the cocky, complicated boxer and incendiary political figure depicted in obituaries. Instead, Hana fleshes out the Ali of his later years... She presents her father as a funny, doting family man who looks for ways to bring joy to ordinary people. Ultimately, his final victory is his greatest: coming to terms with this illness after realising that it was the one opponent he would never beat.

—— The Times

Intimate... Moving... [This] memoir charts Hana's treasured memories of a man hailed as one of the first global superstars of sport.

—— Sunday Mirror

How wonderful, after decades of thoughtful but at-a-distance portraits of Muhammad Ali, we have this exquisite and movingly intimate one. His daughter, Hana, has permitted us all to fill out—with love—our own sense of the real man behind all the mythology. This is a hugely important addition to our understanding of the Greatest of All Time.

—— Ken Burns, filmmaker

A famous man will be viewed one way by the public. Another by his wife. Another by his children. Hana brings together these vantage points — and allows everyone to see Muhammad Ali in a new light.

—— Larry King

This book is filled with golden nuggets. Golden nuggets about Muhammad Ali that you could never find anywhere else because only Hana Ali is in the position to share them. And share them she does with all her heart. Reading this book, I think I fully understood how difficult it must’ve been for Hana to look this deeply into her experience to write it. What an undertaking, and Hana rose to the challenge — just like her dad.

—— Cal Fussman , New York Times bestselling author of Double or Nothing

Hana has brought to life all of the love, joy, and complexities of our lives at our home on Fremont Place. She has beautifully written every word herself, bringing our family’s faded memories to the present. I have pondered, laughed, and cried along with each piece of her heart. Her father would be as proud of her, as I am.

—— Veronica Porche

Only Hana could have written this extraordinary Memoir. She had a special bond with our father, unlike anyone else. People always think that I was daddy’s girl because I followed him into the boxing ring, but she was actually the one! This book is one of a kind, full of wisdom and heart which comes to life on these pages.

—— Laila Ali

A brisk, chatty and light-hearted account of Parks’s encounters with neurologists and philosophers looking for the location of consciousness

—— Alan Ryan , New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

In this eye-opening, important and utterly enjoyable book, Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas use science to explain how humour at work (and in life) helps alleviate stress, anxiety, and burnout. Come for the humour, stay for the insights

—— Arianna Huffington, co-founder of The Huffington Post and CEO of Thrive Global

If this book and Brad Pitt walked into a bar, and I could only pick one, I'd take the book home with me

—— Nancy Lublin, Former CEO, Crisis TextLine and DoSomething.Org

Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas have written a remarkable book for a remarkable moment in history. I long ago learned that when weighed down by serious matters, one may best be taken seriously by seeking out a certain light-heartedness as an expression of humility, optimism and confidence on the road to the serious business of nurturing trust and leading others

—— Joel Peterson, Chairman of Jetblue Airways

This myth-busting, grin-inducing, data-driven humdinger of a book simply nails what I've clung on to for years: that humour can be more than ephemeral entertainment. When appropriately curated, it creates the right culture for success. In fact, its absence should be a cause for concern. You may eat your five a day and walk ten thousand steps but when did you last check if there was enough laughter in your life, in your team, in your business? If you had a centuries-old tried and tested tool that enhances rapport, creativity, collaboration, resilience, leadership, mental and physical health, sales and more - why wouldn't you use it?

—— Neil Mullarkey Author, speaker, improviser and Co-founder, London’s Comedy Store Players

I've been a comedian for ages, and this book has finally convinced me that joking around can actually be important and helpful.

—— Ed Gamble

Along the way the anonymised author, AK Benjamin, offers funny and unsettling insights into the vagaries of the relationship between clinicians and patients

—— Colin Grant , New Statesman, *Books of the Year*

A creative account of a life with little sleep… Readers looking for their own cure will instead find an erudite companion to help them through the dark times.

—— Helen Davies , Sunday Times

It's funny, sad, wry, always worrying away at the mystery of sleep and its absence and finding endless new angles so that the whole has something of the quality of those waking dreams that haunt the insomniac and are her private country.

—— Andrew Miller

A slim, intense memoir about her own year-long experience of nocturnal unrest… a torture Harvey describes with a combination of desperation, wry humour and — despite the scarcity she is subjected to — a deeply felt sense of life’s abundance… [her] proseglows off the page: an exacting inquisition of the self leading to imperfect peace.

—— Catherine Taylor , Financial Times

[Harvey is] brilliant on words and the nature of writing.

—— Roger Alton , Daily Express

[With The Shapeless Unease] Harvey has certainly proved that insomnia, as much as any of the more obviously nasty diseases, might be as worthy a subject of literature as love, battle or jealousy…her book rises to that level.

—— Jake Kerridge , Sunday Telegraph

[A] bravely exposing deep dive into the emotional murk of her [Havey’s] restless mind….[it] reveals…the irresistible writerly impulse to pin experience to the page.

—— Anthony Cummins , i

[The Shapeless Unease] reads like a dream sequence… Even reading this made me feel dizzy… [Harvey is] a vigorous, eloquent writer… she conveys the way sleeplessness takes you into the death zone of life.

—— Ysenda Maxtone Graham , Tablet

Mesmerising…at times, bitingly funny… [The Shapeless Unease is] an engrossing portrait of the fragility of identity and coherency in the grip of insomnia. I hadn’t read Harvey before this, but her facility with language here captivated me and I’ll be seeking out her novels next.

—— Valerie O’Riordan , Bookmunch

Urgent and full of arresting images and insights.

—— Stephanie Cross , Lady

[The Shapeless Unease] is littered with sharp insights expressed in exquisitely lucid prose but is as amorphous as its title suggests.

—— Keiron Pim , Spectator

It’s a claustrophobic, enlightening, moving, existential treatise on sleep, insomnia and death. And it’s funny, too.

—— Sadie Jones , Guardian

I wish I had saved The Shapeless Unease to read in isolation but Samantha Harvey’s book about insomnia, time, death and so many unknowable things is a blessing to have in lonely times. It is a profound and stunning book but funny, too.

—— Fatima Bhutto , Evening Standard

A beautiful, jagged little book about insomnia and so many unknowable things: life and death, Buddhism, and how language alters our thinking. But I was most struck by its form and structure.

—— Fatima Bhutto , New Statesman

[Samantha Harvey's] cerebral, startlingly clear account of somehow pulling through [from insomnia] carries an electric charge and meditates on not only the mystery of sleep but also writing, swimming and dreams.

—— Net-a-Porter

[The Shapeless Unease] is beautifully crafted and its achievement makes itself more apparent on a second reading.

—— Richard Gwyn , Wales Art Review

A masterpiece, so good I can hardly breathe. I'm completely floored by it.

—— Helen Macdonald

This book seems appropriately messy-haired and wild-eyed... Anyone who has lain awake the night before a big test will recognize such manic flourishes. Harvey captures the 4 a.m. bloom of magical thinking; stories proliferate within stories... To read Harvey is to grow spoiled on gorgeous phrases.

—— Katy Waldman , New Yorker
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