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The best sports books do a lot more than talk about the basics. They are bold and thoroughly researched, and—with any luck—written in lively prose. There’s culture and nuance, a great deal of character and,more often than not, a lot of fine photography and illustrations.
Take “Ali: A Life” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 623 pages, $30). Jonathan Eig, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, starts the book with a pop: “His great-grandfather was a slave. His grandfather was a convicted murderer who shot a man through the…