In Floyd Patterson: The Fighting Life of Boxing's Invisible Champion, Kip Stratton tells the extraordinary story of the first man to win the world heavyweight boxing title twice. In his 1962 fight against Sonny Liston, Patterson came to symbolise both the hopes and fears of Americans during the battle for civil rights. John F. Kennedy put Patterson forward as the acceptable face of the civil-rights movement, in opposition to the ex-convict Liston, who, to many white Americans, embodied all the aspects of ‘the bad Negro’. Patterson overcame a childhood affliction with stammering and low self-esteem, and he remained a shy, retiring man in marked contrast with boxers like Muhammad Ali and Liston. Yet he was an extremely talented boxer who, in his victorious title rematch with Ingemar Johansson, threw a left hook that many still argue was the best single punch ever thrown, and of whom Ali said that he had ‘the best boxing skills’ of all his opponents. This is a detailed and meticulously researched biography of this conflicted, contradictory man, an athlete who competed in an era when sport, particularly boxing, had the power to dramatise the conflicts of an entire society.