In this NY Times article, Boxing author Budd Schulberg reviews Dave Kindred’s new book about the fascinating relationship between Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell, Sound and Fury : Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship (Free Press 2006). Schulberg gives the book a hearty thumbs up, and notes that Kindred opens by describing the Ali-Cosell relationship in the context of Edith Wharton’s famous quotation about light:

“There are two sources of light, / The candle, / And the mirror that reflects it.” The homely kid from Brooklyn and the black Adonis from Louisville alter-egoed each other so perfectly that each seems both candle and mirror to the other.

Schulberg also notes in his review two of best lines about Cosell:

[T]the gifted columnist Jimmy Cannon skewered Cosell as the only guy who ever “changed his name and put on a toupee to ‘tell it like it is,’ ” and the boxing historian Bert Randolph Sugar said, “He demonstrated again and again that he knows very little about the game but is not afraid to describe it” . . .