Having just read David Kindred's Sound and Fury: Two Powerful Lives, One Fateful Friendship, which tracks the relationship between Muhammad Ali and Howard Cosell, I'm all for thoughtful reconsiderations of Ali's embrace of the Nation of Islam and anti-draft stance in the 1960s. I still believe in the heroic nature of his resistance, but I'm willing to hear out counterarguments, and Kindred, while sympathetic overall, demythologizes Ali by making solid points about, for example, the cold shoulder he gave Malcolm X to side publicly with Elijah Muhammad. I have yet to read Jack Cashill's Sucker Punch: The Hard Left Hook That Dazed Ali and Killed King's Dream, which appears (based on the catalog copy) to make a stronger version of that and other anti-Ali arguments, so I can't really speak to the character of its content. But the cover (reproduced at left)? The folks in the Thomas Nelson art department should be ashamed of themselves; that sort of innuendo is not befitting nice Christian publishers (even if the book is being put out by its more "secular" wing, Nelson Current).

Fine, it's not like you have to work all that hard to find pictures of Ali with his mouth that wide open, as the cover to Dave Zirin's What's My Name, Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the United States (right) proves. Zirin, by the way, recently won Press Action's Sportswriter of the Year award, and he's currently writing A People's History of Sports for the New Press, so you can guess how he comes down in the Ali debate...But where was I? Right. So, yeah, pictures of Ali and his mouth, whatever. The way Nelson has handled this one is, at the risk of being construed as equally vulgar, strictly bush league. And it's no fair falling back on the crassness of the marketplace; frankly, one expects better from a company with a self-declared ongoing mission of "following in the footsteps of the godly young bookseller and publisher whose name we proudly bear." Maybe Current is Thomas Nelson's wayward child—if so, it needs a time-out.

UPDATE: A publicist for the book has offered an explanation for the cover, saying it illustrates how far-left elements "put the words in Ali's mouth."