Rating: 
Summary: A Great Read
Review: I thought that this was an excellent book filled with interesting information on a fighter that is not written about often. I don't know if Liston threw the first fight, although his jab had no snap and he looked lethargic. At one point Tosches quotes Newsweek: "Preparing for the biggest fight of his life...(Liston)walks 7 miles in 7-pound shoes, shadow boxes four rounds, and skips rope nine minutes." This is a light workout, even for a overweight middle aged man, so perhaps Liston was just out of shape. His quitting is similar to Duran's "no mas", where a fighter has lost almost every round and does not see a chance of winning. Liston more likely threw the second fight. Ali generally did not knock his opponent out with one punch. He would slip, block, and absorb punches, tire his opponent, and come on strong in the latter third of the later rounds.
Rating:
Summary: Endangered Species
Review: At first, I thought that I could not quite understand why everyone seems to be so judgmental of Nick Tosches's writing style in The Devil and Sonny Liston, but I think I have figured it out.We've been trained by Hollywood and cheap drug store fiction to just bite into one interpretation, one solid answer, one unavoidable truth that we savor for about two minutes after turning the last page, and then we go pour a cup of coffee and turn on the tube. No, Tosches does not say "and Ali's punch missed his chin." He does not say "and it was a phantom punch." No, instead, Nick Tosches is patient, artful and lets the weight of the evidence tell the facts. What we are told is this by the one and only Joe Louis: "Nobody's gonna beat Sonny Liston 'cept old age." We are told this by one of Liston's handlers: "If you knew anything about boxing, you knew there was no way that Clay could hurt Liston." And then, we get the knockout punch from Tosches himself. Tosches writes: ""One thing was certain: in that rematch...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." Hello? Am I the only one who read this book with some sort of discernment? What more do we need? THE MAN LAYED DOWN IN THE FIRST ROUND BECAUSE THE MOB TOLD HIM TO, AND HE LISTENED. YES, IT WAS A FIX. YES, IT WAS A PHANTOM PUNCH. What we have here are the opinions of an era in which stories that are not told in two minutes are just no good, and tales that leave themselves open to interpretation are simply burdensome or, as one reviewer claims, "melodramatic." Some reviewers opine that the book leaves us without an answer as to the cause of Liston's death. Again, I just don't see the confusion on this one. Here are the author's own words: "he took too much dope and died (page 253)." Hmm...sounds like a rather conclusive answer to me, folks. Well, Nick, looks like your kind are an endangered species. No time for poetry, no time for artful metaphor, this is the age of "give us ten minutes, we'll give you the world." Truth is, The Devil and Sonny Liston is one of the best biographies I've ever read. It is suspenseful, yet poetic, informative and conclusive, yet open-minded and expansive. Nick Tosches took one ugly, shady life and turned it into a brutally honest piece of poetry that guarantees to leave readers unsettled at the book's end. In all truth, that's how you know that this is a great book, people were left thinking after the last period. As for myself, I went out and bought three Nick Tosches books after I read The Devil and Sonny Liston, because Tosches instantly became one of my favorite writers. If you're patient with him, he'll do the same for you.
Rating: 
Summary: Oh...the drama!
Review: I struggled through this book, reading painful page after painful page. If it were not for my personal interest in Sonny Liston, I would not have made it through. And at the end of it all, I was left feeling cheated, uninformed, and ANGRY (I felt similarly after seeing "Showgirls"). Now, in my mind, Nick Tosches owes me some time. Tosches tries too hard. Tosches mistakes melodrama for poeticism. I'll recap the meat of the text for you here and now: Sonny Liston grew up poor. Sonny Liston became a criminal. Sonny Liston learned to box. Sonny Liston was really feared. Sonny Liston was connected to the mob. Sonny Liston died of heart failure. The End. Avoid this one.
Rating:
Summary: the devil and sonny liston
Review: It got a little verbose in some parts, but all in all a very interesting book. I do question one item. On page 228, he states in December 1969 Liston was knocked out by Leotis Martin in the 9th round. I saw that fight on TV, and in December 1969 I was in Vietnam and could not have seen it, and I am sure when I was there, so I question the date?
Rating:
Summary: Tosches knows zero about boxing
Review: I've read and loved the biographies Tosches did of Jerry Lee Lewis and Dean Martin, which I suppose are classics in a way, and the novel "Cut Numbers" is okay if a little too "Mean Streets"-ish. "Trinities" [another novel] is a mishmash, too ambitious perhaps, trying to be more than genre and ending up bad genre as a result. This Sonny Liston book -- who put Tosches up to writing this? It's too plainly obvious that he knows zip about boxing, in fact I really wonder if he's ever seen either of the Clay/Ali fights: Tosches just doesn't know what he's talking about. And there are Italian-Americans, mafioso or not, who will tell you, in New York bars [where Tosches famously does a lot of his "research"], that every big fight you've ever heard of has been fixed and they know who fixed it and why -- it makes good gossip after everyone's had a few drinks and it cannot be disproved. This was a bad topic for Tosches to go after. He tries to bluster his way through and squanders credibility as he does.
Rating: 
Summary: Eddie Machen
Review: Eddie Machen did not run from Sonny Liston as Mr. Tosches maintains. I saw the fight on televsion and what was clear that Machen by going side to side and backward was trying to get Liston to swing over and and wide of him so Machen could counter. I thought it worked but the judges didn't. But Machen didn't run. There's nothing in boxing which says you have to stand infront of your opponent.
Rating: 
Summary: A Man Of Many Faces
Review: The cover of this book tells the story... Black and white, shades of light encapsulating the scene, a man, on all fours struggling to rise. Sonny Liston was a walking contradiction. On one hand he could be brutal and cruel, cold, and uncarring. Then in the blink of eye, he's playing with children, laughing and smiling. The children respond, unafraid of a man who scared so many others. Nick Tosches captures the essence of Liston, the many sides, moods, and moments of the former champs life. It's not a pretty picture, the mob is everywhere, filtering in and out of Liston's life like a long dark shadow. Torches research is amazing, his writing of the Liston family is highly informative. Going in i already knew quite a bit about Sonny, but Tosches uncovers facts that i had never read before. This is not a book for everybody. Tosches style is blunt and hard, like a left hook to the jaw, he wanders sometimes, but like the man he is writing about ultimatly there is understanding. If your a boxing fan, you might be disappointed at the short shift Tosches gives to a number of Liston's fights. It's the behind the scenes activity he wants to tell you about, the wheeling and dealing thats so compelling. It's brutal and sad.. Highly Recomended
Rating:
Summary: Scattered, but compelling read.
Review: Another fine Nick Tosches biography. Tosches is not for everybody as style invades substance with much more frequency than classic biographies. However, the style fits the oddball subject here. Liston, an illiterate with a minor past, doesn't offer a lot of meat to deal with. Tosches still creates a fascinating book that wanders among the facts and provides an interesting insight to boxing and odd corners of the US experience. I do like Tosches' biographies infinitely more than his fiction.
Rating: 
Summary: Fortunately Liston is bigger than Tosches
Review: 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.
Rating:
Summary: Great Bio of a Misunderstood Man
Review: This was an excellent bio by a fine writer. At times I thought he swayed from the subject of Mr. Liston and lost his clear and consice voice, but these instances were relitvely rare. I reccommend this anyone who enjoys bios and excellent writing.
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