From Publishers Weekly
Tosches has always been drawn to the lives of dark and mysteriously flawed or fallen public figures--Jerry Lee Lewis in Hellfire, Dean Martin in Dino--and in one-time heavyweight champ Charles "Sonny" Liston he has found his biggest and darkest figure yet. Born in abject poverty in eastern Arkansas, Liston grew up to be a quiet, inarticulate youth who, after moving with his mother to St. Louis, put his only talent to work: intimidation. Knocking over gas stations and grocery stores, he ended up in a penitentiary doing eight years. His brawny build and huge hands made him an invincible force in the prison boxing program, which earned him an early release but delivered him into an enslavement from which he never escaped. Tosches marshals prodigious research to prove that, early on, Liston became captive to organized crime at a time when boxing was ruled by a mob syndicate. This is a very sad tale of an illiterate man who became useful to figures who had their own agenda: making money. Tosches finds people close to Liston who claim the fighter told them that his first bout with the man then known as Cassius Clay was fixed (with the mob taking down $2.1 million by betting on the 7-to-1 underdog); others strongly imply that the outcome of the second fight--that of the infamous "phantom punch"--in Lewiston, Maine, was also a foregone conclusion. Events around the beleaguered and bewildered Liston whirl at dizzying speeds--the Kefauver investigation of boxing, the war in Vietnam, the rise of the Nation of Islam, the cultural roar of the 1960s generation--and Tosches is a master at keeping his finger on the pulse of the period and his eye on the pitiable Sonny. Throughout, though, what is most remarkable is Tosches's empathy for the fighter derided as "a bear," a "hoodlum" and, by the loquacious Ali, as simply "ugly." In Tosches's hands, Liston is an unfortunate victim of people much worse than he, and the boxer emerges with a kind of mute dignity: this man "who neither knew his age nor felt any ties of blood upon this earth nor saw any future knew only that he was nobody and that he had come from nowhere and that he was nowhere." In a prose style that runs like a hot improvisational jazz riff, Tosches makes a somebody of a nobody, and along the way brings more than a few reputations down a good notch. (Apr.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Vincent Patrick
Tosches has a talent for getting inside the skin of such men, as he does for drawing out meaty stories from the denizens of shadowy worlds--neither an easy task.


Entertainment Weekly
"Tosches' hard-bitten prose is well suited to the task of bringing Liston...to vividly seedy life...A"


Wall Street Journal, 4/21/00
"...[Tosches'] exhaustive research paints as clear a picture as we're likely to get of his enigmatic subject..."


Washington Post Book World, 5/7/00
"Tosches can't write a dull book, especially when he's animated, and he's animated here..."

FROM OUR EDITORS

In the last century, a fighter emerged from the humid torpor of the plantation South whose unstoppable momentum in the boxing ring mirrored the profound carnage of his personal life. Charles "Sonny" Liston's meteoric rise to the heavyweight championship was without precedent, inspiring genuine dread in his adversaries and despair in those who met with his left jab and right cross.

His lethal fistic skills weren't just the tools of sport. The gigantic man's expertise in battery was perhaps the only compass by which he navigated his short life through a world of both sweet innocence and profound evil. As Nick Tosches writes in his new biography of the boxer, The Devil and Sonny Liston, the fighter's life "would reveal a soul that, even amid the darkness in which it dwelt, eluded all concepts of good and evil, of right and wrong, of light and dark themselves."

Though writing in richly textured language, Tosches spares no mundane details in a thoroughly researched examination of a man who defined both the summit of professional sporting potential and its worst possible excesses. In fact, the details of Liston's life are so tangled in a Gordian knot of historical arcana that were Tosches to fully unravel the mysteries and implications, he might very well free the secrets of American criminal society itself.

Tosches squares off against an enigmatic subject that epitomizes an unbreachable fortress of definition in either time or space. Though the author has clearly followed countless leads in his Herculean quest, placing a date for Liston's birth is as impossible as determining its location in a land of shape-shifting, river-flooded farm countryside. It seems, for example, that, in a life where "family" was at best a mutable concept, it would be obvious that no one would even know for sure the genesis of his nickname.

Emerging from the bleak poverty of tenant farmers and sharecroppers "working for halves," Liston moved to St. Louis and grew from reckless, petty criminal to local mob leg-breaker to the most fear professional boxer in the modern history of the sport. With often numbing detail, Tosches has done considerable detective work tracing a life that burned as briefly, brightly, and dangerously as a road flare. At times, the catalogue of people and places becomes a biblical dirge that might test the fortitude of anyone but historians and the most devoted boxing fans, yet it is a story with tendrils that extend as far as the African American's rise from slavery, the insidious influence of the Mafia in American society, and the rise of modern professional sports.

The names connected to this tale are those we've seen reappear, with Keyser Soze's dark persistency, throughout our nation's most troubling times; Sam Giancana, Frankie Carbo, Roy Cohn, Barney Baker, and John Vitale, among many others, make appearances. Meanwhile, other fighters, such as Floyd Patterson (a good guy, as Tosches depicts him) and Mohammed Ali (who Tosches views as something of a corporate clown), are also players in this deeply troubling drama of an African-American champion who attained both the laurels that accompany athletic success and a dark reputation for criminal behavior that made him anathema to the NAACP.

Of course, Tosches addresses the fixed fights, especially the astonishing rematch against Ali: "When Sonny lay down in the first, he showed less acting ability than in the episode of "Love American Style" in which he later bizarrely appeared." Yet while he investigates these moments of shame and infamy, Tosches doesn't rest the foundations of the Liston tragedy on them. Rather, the Liston/Ali saga is one of the underpinnings he uses to show an almost inescapable pattern of fate leading to Liston's mysterious death.

By the time Tosches's narrative arrives at the discovery of Liston's badly decomposed corpse, we're almost asked to accept it as a natural force. Liston -- an illiterate famously terrified of needles and reputedly averse to narcotics died from a heroin overdoes, with a newspaper beside his hat to marke the alleged date of his demise. Yet, while he enumerates the various conspiracy theories surrounding the death, Tosches seems to discount the importance of any single one, as if to say that Liston -- an alcoholic rapist, batterer, and robber, yet a man reported to love children -- was self-destroyed, even if not directly by his own hand.

--Jack Taylor

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Nick Tosches's brutal, stunning, and widely praised biography of Sonny Liston-the world heavyweight champion who hit harder than any man alive, and who embodied everything that is compelling and terrifying about boxing.

Author Biography: Nick Tosches was born in Newark and schooled in his father's Jersey City bar. He is the author of Dino, an acclaimed biography of Dean Martin, among other books. He is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair.

FROM THE CRITICS

Entertainment Weekly

Tosches' hard-bitten prose is well suited to the task of bringing Liston...to vividly seedy life...

New York Times Book Review

...hard, tough writing suited to a hard, tough subject...

Austin Chronicle

Tosches is smooth and cool and in control here...tells a captivating, tragic tale.

The Denver Post

...at once biography and meditation...boast[s] the author's trademarks: insight and raving excess. One doesn't so much read a Tosches book as experience it...

Washington Post Book World