A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, played, heard, observed, worn, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here.

What: “King of the World;” by David Remnick; (Random House).

Price: $25

This treasure is about all the big and little reasons Muhammad Ali emerged from--he seemed to explode out of--the early 1960s, and Floyd Patterson, Sonny Liston, Jimmy Cannon and almost everybody else who mattered in sports did not.

There are, as this book recounts, reasons every thing he did then still seems intuitive and breathtaking--he was remaking a world, or it was remaking itself around him.

Ali made the journey in less than three years--the span of Remnick’s book, the time it took for him to shock the world, associate with Malcolm X, and refuse to submit to the draft during the Vietnam War.

This is not the first book about Ali, of course. But so much of the Ali publishing output is nostalgia, freezing him in the past and juxtaposing his charisma and power against the slow-moving, Parkinson’s-ravaged, sleepy middle-aged man of today.

Remnick, though, brings us an Ali with immediacy, an Ali whose voice is loud and honest and rude and wonderful, an Ali pitched against a backdrop of accepted and nonaccepted black champions, an Ali whose eyes burn and whose mind is racing ahead, an Ali who is an echo of Jack Johnson and fan of Joe Louis, both contemporary and inheritor of Malcolm and Martin Luther King Jr.

An Ali who is forever modern.

Maybe the most compelling passages tell of Ali’s friendship with Malcolm, their importance to each other, and then Ali’s eventual abandonment of the increasingly controversial leader.

Later, in an epilogue, Ali mourns the loss of Malcolm to Remnick, and it is a powerful moment. This book is full of powerful moments because those three years of Ali were powerful enough to reshape everything.

Muhammad Ali did not go to the mountain. The mountain went to him.