He s one of the most interesting American athletes in the past fifty years. Passionate, candid, iconoclastic and gifted both on and off the court, Charles Barkley has left a lasting impact not only on the world of basketball, but pop culture at large.   Yet few people know the real Charles. Raised by his mother and grandmother in Leeds, Alabama, he struggled in his early years to fit in until finding a sense of community and purpose in basketball. In the NBA he went toe-to-toe with the biggest legends in the game, from Magic to Michael to Hakeem to Shaq. But in the years since he has become a bold agitator for social change, unafraid to grapple, often brashly, with even the thorniest of cultural issues facing our nation today.   Informed by over 370 original interviews and painstaking research, Timothy Bella s Barkley is the most comprehensive biography to date of one of the most talked about icons in the world of sports.