The Devil and Sonny Liston (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "THE CORPSE WAS ROLLED OVER AND LAY FACE down on the metal slab..." (more)
Key Phrases: undercover manager, licensed manager, sausage pinch, Sonny Liston, New York, Las Vegas (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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.

From The Washington Post

"Tosches can't write a dull book, especially when he's animated, and he's animated here..."

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1st Printing edition (April 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316897752
• ISBN-13: 978-0316897754
• Product Dimensions: 9.6 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (63 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #258,237 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This could have been a 5-star book!, October 31, 2005

By	John A. Alfano (Elon, NC United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Devil and Sonny Liston (Paperback)

Fortunately I wound up picking this book up at the library. If I had paid for it I would have been doubly disappointed.

I'd never read anything by Nick Tosches before but if this is an example of his writing style I think I'll pass on the rest of his catalogue. Most of the information was interesting but the rambling and disjointed chronology had me hoping for the end by the time I reached the 3/4 mark. At times Tosches is all over the place; talking about some event in Liston's life and then jumping to an interview with somebody who gives comments totally unrelated to what we just read.

I'm not sure if Tosches is trying to impress the reader with his tough-guy image but he liberally laces the book with expletives which, if they were direct quotes from someone would be fine. But these are the words of the author, who apparently feels that he has to insert a little street slang in the narrative to show that he is a man of the streets. It just doesn't work.

I learned a fair amount about Sonny Liston that I didn't know before. But the unfortunate part is that I had to wallow through too much extraneous information to do it. Maybe it's my shortcoming but I found it difficult at times to follow the webwork of gangland connections that seemed to be a centerpiece of the book.

By the last chapter I found that I couldn't care less whether Liston had died of natural causes or been murdered. The evidence provided for murder is very thin and may not have even been worth a mention. Tosches could have written a well thought out and enticing biography of Sonny Liston but this wasn't it.

27 of 33 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Fortunately Liston is bigger than Tosches, June 13, 2000

By	richard_t "richard_t" (Overseas) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

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Nick Tosches is a wannabe. A fellow who tries too hard to be a tough-guy New York scribe, a hard-boiled Jimmy Breslin been-there badge-out type, who uses too many gratuitous obscenities and throwaway racist insults. A guy who writes in his own cover-blurb bio that he was "schooled in his father's bar...and his poetry readings are legend." Give me a break. He wastes a lot of over-research trying to set a dark mystical ambience for this Liston bio, so we get pages of pseudo-Joseph Conrad stuff about Dahomey slavery and Mississippi Choctaw, boll weevils and a 5th century bishop. Show-off meaningless riffs on Janus the god and Aristotle on slavery. Of course, this from a guy who thinks Aristotle is a "pillar of Judeo-Christian thought". Who gives us three pages on the history of slavery as he contemplates Liston's condition like he would his own navel. Yawn. And then a bunch of hard-guy talk about God's "white a**" and racist nonsense from an oh-too-black white guy, despite his comment that Liston was remarkably free of racial prejudice.

Finally, about fifty pages in, we get to Liston and his boxing career. If you've made it this far, you can make it to the end. Tosches' research has yielded infinitely more about dozens of long-forgotten hoods than about Liston himself, what he thinks, what he says. The fights are barely mentioned at all. But just when Liston's life gets interesting, Tosches lapses into another unreadable passage about wind and blood and incomprehensible tough-guy jargon that must pass for profundity at Toshche's `legendary' poetry readings. He twice mentions, apropos of absolutely nothing, that Joe Kennedy earned dirty money, calling JFK "the brat offspring of a criminal fortune". Wha? Why is that here? It doesn't even rhyme with the line before it.

He has lots of unsupported conspiracy theories. "America did not want Sonny as her champion", the Black Muslims "got to Sonny", this after earnestly explaining that "Islam was a religion of slavery" (p.217). Finally, with no evidence except his own attitude, he opines that "to accept the premise that Sonny was murdered is, by necessity, to accept the involvement and the malfeasance of cops in that murder." Um, ok, Nick.

Strangely enough, the book is not an utter failure. Sonny Liston as a character is so outsized and compelling that he manages to seize the reader's interest in spite of Tosches' very best efforts to reduce the story to nonsense. It's hardly recommended, but if you find yourself on a deserted island with it, and you tear out the first fifty and last ten pages, well, the rest of the book would be passable with some judicious editing.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars I'm Going to Vote with the "Ayes" on This One, May 5, 2000

By	Mark K. Mcdonough "Mark McDonough" (Reston, VA USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Nick Tosches is not a conventional biographer, which may eitherdelight or disappoint you as you read this book.

Depending on yourattitude about life, as an old friend of mine used to say.

I was delighted. I didn't really set out to be a Tosches fan, but I realized a couple of years back that I own and have read every single book he's ever written.

The thread that runs through all of Tosches writing, fiction and non, is that "the real history isn't in the books." Yes, a straightforward facts-and-dates biography would be a useful companion piece to this book, but Tosches would say that the real truth about Sonny Liston is the subterranean truth, the truth that didn't make it into print, or if it did, only as hints and rumors.

As for the charge that this book is just a re-hash of old magazine articles, clearly it is not. Tosches tracked down and talked to a large number of people who knew Liston in various stages of his life, and obviously consulted primary sources as well. The book is not a "fight biography" with gripping accounts of blows traded. It's more like a series of flashlight stabs into a nightmare.

Fourth-rate Mailer? Nah, Tosches has little of Mailer's self-importance (God love him). More like a Northeastern relative of music jouranlist Stanley Booth. As he did in "Dino," Tosches uses a novelist's technique to draw a portrait of a man who remains unknowable. END