In 1975 in Kinshasa, Zaire, at the virtual center of Africa, two African-American boxers were paid five million dollars apiece to fight with other until one was declared the winner. One was Muhammad Ali, the aging but irrepressible "professor of boxing" who vowed to reclaim the championship he had lost. The other was George Foreman, who was as taciturn as Ali was voluble and who kept his hands in his pockets "the way a hunter lays his rifle back into his velvet case". Observing them was Norman Mailer, whose grasp of the titanic battle's feints and strategies -- and whose sensitivity to the deepened symbolism -- make this book a masterpiece of the literature of sport.