The number of library shelves currently straining from the weight of books about Muhammad Ali is not insignificant, nor should it be, but historians will tell you, in that annoying way of theirs, that compared to the raging, culture-capsizing controversies that surrounded the fight career of one Jack Johnson, even Ali's story is strictly undercard stuff.

	"UNFORGIVABLE BLACKNESS: THE RISE AND FALL OF JACK JOHNSON" By Geoffrey C. Ward Knopf ($26.95)

More than a half-century before Ali brought his deliciously brazen impishness to a sport desperate for personality and a culture increasingly bereft of civility, Johnson swaggered out of Galveston, Texas. He arrived with the ring skills of a misanthrope surgeon, a rogue's smile, a disdain for authority of any kind and a destiny that would deliver the heavyweight championship of the world to its first black steward.

None of that sat well with white people from England to Australia and back, nor did Johnson's predilection for the attentions of white women, none of whom seemed to sit well with black audiences along the same track.

At the turn of the 20th century, Johnson inflamed a good chunk of civilization with the totality of this ostentatious repertoire and absolutely loved doing it. It made them hate him all the more.

Ultimately, he would be ruined by his own government, imprisoned and exiled.

"It is unfortunate that a man with money should use it a way to injure his own people in the eyes of those who are seeking to uplift his race and improve its condition," said one social critic. "A man with muscle, minus brains, is a useless creature."

And that was from Booker T. Washington.

It should all come to life again in the latest book from the decorated writer and historian Geoffrey C. Ward, but it never quite does.

There is much brilliant writing in these 450-odd pages, but precious little of it is from the author, who lets himself be outwritten by the ragtag sports journalists of the day and by just about everyone else whose prose he invites into this work to illuminate Johnson and his era.

At various dots on the long storyline, contemporary combatants are described as "an English horizontalist," as "fierce, relentless and tireless as a cataract." And we even see some ancient hype: "When [Johnson and Jim Jeffries] meet, the world will see a battle before which the gladiatory combats of ancient Rome pale into childish insignificance."

There is a certain authentic elegance in that, albeit dated and some might say hackneyed, that Ward's writing doesn't duplicate.

"Frank Carillo, working in Johnson's corner between rounds, had bet heavily on the outcome," Ward writes. "And halfway through the fight, when it was by no means clear Johnson would win, he flashed his revolver in his fighter's face and warned that he would shoot him if he didn't make a greater effort to come out on top. He also made sure that the referee saw his weapon, in hopes he would remember it when the time came to render a decision."

You can dismiss this as a matter of literary taste, but even 100 years removed from the event, a gun in the fight ring doesn't strike me as an occasion for droll understatement.

Ward's dryness pervades these pages and almost splinters them.

He was primary writer of epic television projects such as "The Civil War," "Baseball," "The West" and "Jazz," and was rightfully awarded some of the nation's top literary prizes for other works, but the underwritten "Unforgiveable Blackness" cries for some Ken Burns sepia tones and an evocative soundtrack. I hope it gets both. (Burns' documentary on Johnson airs on PBS next month.)

Its strength in this form comes mainly from the overpowering characters. In addition to the singular Johnson and his dozens of idiosyncratic sycophants, trainers, managers, hookers, gamblers, etc., there is, for example, Charles E. Erbstein, a Chicago lawyer who could have been the prototype for Billy Flynn, the unscrupulous defender of murderesses in the hit musical that became the Oscar-winning film, "Chicago."

Erbstein teamed with the mother of one of Johnson's white lady friends, Lucille Cameron, to bring the fighter up on kidnapping charges.

Also, we find in these pages none other than Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, bringing the pomposity and bravado to one of Johnson's bail hearings that he would eventually ride to a legacy position as the first commissioner of baseball.

All of the elements of a monumental literary work are present here, including the vast evidence of a world deranged by hatred and the uncomfortable sensation that we are every bit as deranged today in ways we still don't understand.

But the qualities that make these kinds of works a consistently enjoyable read are missing.