Twelve Rounds to Glory (12 Rounds to Glory): The Story of Muhammad Ali

Back in June, when the American Library Association was meeting in Washington, D.C., I had the opportunity to spend some quality time over in the National Portrait Gallery. After immersing myself in historical portraits for hours, blissfully wandering through dozens of rooms, alcoves and hallways, I had the good fortune to encounter an amazing exhibit titled "Being There," which showcased more than one hundred unforgettable photographs by Harry Benson. It was like looking at a visual soundtrack of the world I've experienced through the media over my five decades of life on Earth. While there were a number of photos in the exhibit with which I was quite familiar, one that I could not believe I'd never seen before has Muhammad Ali with his boxing gloves laced up, clowning with the Beatles when they visited his training camp in 1964. It was so fascinating to see John Lennon and Muhammad Ali together in a photo like that, one that was taken in the era when I first got to see each of them on television, a sweet, innocent time for me despite the recent Presidential assassination having shaken my childhood. "I ain't got no quarrel with the VietCong. No VietCong ever called me nigger." -- Muhammad Ali "If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace." -- John Lennon It would be these two larger-than-life figures, two of the most famous people in world that I've lived through, two men I idolized from the early Sixties onward, who would change my life and my outlook on everything I'd previous thought, when each spoke out so passionately during my young adolescent years against the Vietnam War. TWELVE ROUNDS TO GLORY is a visual and textual celebration of the life and times of a great American hero. Amidst the recounting of his legendary boxing career -- bout-by-memorable-bout -- we see how Ali's legacy as a man of conscience, an antiwar spokesman whose words echoed the world over, became one of the pivotal aspects of his life. The other legacy, also portrayed so vividly here, is of Ali's desire to help those in need, and his need to eventually go back into the ring at an age when he shouldn't have done so in order to earn huge paychecks that could be used to finance care for the underprivileged in America. It is so sad to contemplate how Ali might be in far better shape today if he'd not felt it necessary to put his physical well-being, his mortal body, on the line for the sake of others. Woven into TWELVE ROUNDS OF GLORY are significant chapters of the story of the America of my own lifetime: "Admired and loved by your Olympic peers, you soon returned home to parades of wild cheers that greeted you as you stepped off the plane with hundreds of people all chanting your name: 'Ca-shus, Ca-shus, ' they roared across Louisville. But the welcome was short because away from the sport the country you fought for still put people, like laundry, in two separate piles, and forced you, a black man, to deal with hate