Rating: 
Summary: Oops
Review: It is obvious here that Nick Tosches got too hung up trying to write a tough guy biography in a fast paced beat. Unfortunalty, Nick runs out of steam before he bumps into Liston. With no footnotes and lots of quotes, the research teeters on the edge of unreliabilty. To me, Tosches attempts to emulate Rick Hornung's unique writing style, but forgets to put in the neccessary (yes tedious) effort of checking and crosschecking references. It's too bad. The Devil and Sonny Liston could have been a great book.
Rating: 
Summary: Let the Sonny go down on this one
Review: This isn't much of a bio. The writing is OK but in order to build up Sonny, Tosches ignores events, picks and chooses from wildly different versions to suit his beliefs and throws in some nasty cracks at Muhammad Ali and Islam. The worst part is Tosches' conviction that Sonny Liston threw his two fights with Ali because there was no way a fighter as good as Sonny could lose. Yet he's presented pages and pages on Sonny's heavy drinking and unhealtyh behavior in the years before the fight. Tosches conveniently ignores that Sonny had lied about his age and was in his late 30s and hadn't faced a real fighter in years. I've seen the Liston-Ali fights and Tosches description is just wrong. I give Tosches credit with doing what he could with nothing to work on, the book is padded with big type and an endless section on mob control of boxing in the middle. But Tosches ignores the years Liston was denied a title a shot since it contradicts his thesis of Sonny as a tool of all-powerful organized criminals. Likewise Sonny's heavy training before the second Ali fight A real disappointment after the excellent Dino.
Rating: 
Summary: Not Worth the Wait
Review: All you have to know about this book and how much the author knows about boxing, is this: Nick Tosches stated that Archie Moore threw his fight with Rocky Marciano. Moore, if he were to thow a fight could have found a bit easier way of doing so than than taking the pounding he did from the Rock. Just watch the last three rounds of the fight and you tell me if this was a thrown fight. Fair or not, this one seemingly innocuous passage, lost total credibility of the author for me. I paid for this book and now regret it. If you want good stuff on Liston from credible sources (though you may no agree with everything they write) read William Nack' SI piece, Nigel Collins' Boxing Babylon or The HBO documentary on Liston. Tosches may have done some incredible research here, but I don't view him as a reliable source.
Rating: 
Summary: UNDERSTANDING WITHOUT REDEMPTION
Review: HERE, TOSCHES DOES THE IMPOSSIBLE---HE PUTS A HUMAN FACE ON ONE OF THE GREAT MONSTERS OF MODERN SPORTS. IF YOU WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT PRO BOXING IN THE 1950S/1960S, THE VARIOUS FIGURES WHO MADE IT WHAT IT WAS, AND THE "BLUR," WRITES TOSCHES, THAT WAS SONNY LISTON, THEN READ THIS BRISKLY PACED BIOGRAPHY. TOSCHES' CONSIDERATION OF THE ENIGMATIC LISTON IS SENSITIVE, BUT HONEST, AND IT MAKES THIS BOOK ENTERTAINING AND INFORMATIVE. WELL DONE.
Rating: 
Summary: Highly recommended
Review: If one can adjust to the author's somewhat unconventional writing style (and I did), this is an excellent biography for anyone who is interested in Liston's life. It is clearly a heartfelt biography. Several things surprised me about both Liston's life and Tosches' views of it. For example, I had always thought the question of whether Liston threw the second Ali fight in Lewiston, Maine was one of the those unanswerable issues which was never going to be definitively resolved. Certainly that was the opinion of David Remnick in his excellent bio of Muhammad Ali, "King of the World". Yet, Tosches is clearly of the view, not only that the second Ali-Liston fight was fixed, and that the first fight a year earlier was fixed as well, but also that history does not even record any doubts about either of these "facts." He records the two fights as being fixed, as matter-of-factly as if one were to state unequivocally that more than one gunman was involved in the assassination of JFK. It's not that the opinions might not theoretically be correct, it's just that one ought to concede that there are varying viewpoints, as Remnick does.The other thing that surprised me was that, before reading the book, I had always been of the view that the Mafia was an unmitigated negative force in Liston's life, and that things might have been a whole lot different (read: whole lot better), had Liston's path never crossed that of the mob. And yet, in reasing this book, I got the sense that they actually did more positive thingsfor him than negative and actually allowed him to rise through the ranks and get a shot at the title. Of course, whether this is accurate obviously depends in part on whether the mob forced him to throw one or both of the Ali fights. Anyway, it was a very good book and one which I recommend.
Rating:
Summary: Not so sure about this one...
Review: I enjoyed reading Nick Tosches' book about Sonny Liston, mostly for entertainment purposes. While I respect the amount of personal research and exhuming Tosches did, I still find it hard to believe, since his sway on Liston is so clear. He wants to reveal another side of Liston -- the child loving, underpriveleged, the Sonny did-the-best-he-could-with-what-he-had Liston. I think Liston himself worked hard enough to cultivate the opposite image in his lifetime, and it is not for those of us who have survived him to rework him in a more palatable image. As I said, the book is enjoyable, for the fight stories, the bad-boy tales, the tangled mess that was Sonny Liston's life. It is interesting to cross reference books like this with books about Patterson, Ali, or "Tough Jews" about Jewish Gangters and their Italian allies -- apparently behind much of the fight fixing of the era. However, no biography of a dead man can truly tell us much about the real man. Autobiographies are full of half-truths and embellishments (Compare the two Johnny Cash autobiographies) -- how much credibility do you give a guy telling the story of a man he never really knew, through the retellings of people who can hardly remember where they put their teeth? I respect Tosches writing style -- most of the time. His self-consciously cool use of colloquialisms and "I'm not black, but I play one on paper" lingo is a bit annoying. I'm glad I read the book for some reason... The cover photo is beautiful. But what about answering the tough questions? The "phantom punch"? And a little more about the death of Sonny Liston. I think this book is provocative -- makes me think of Tyson as a modern day Liston. I still wonder, though, why did Nick Toches avoid some of the most potent and obvious revelations, when he must have come close to these truths in his tireless manhunt? I appreciate the book for it's loving touch on Sonny Liston, who was obviously not the bad, soulless animal he played, anymore than Ali was invincible and all good.
Rating:
Summary: Makes Me Want to Holler
Review: This is one of those rare books; I love it, yet it drives me crazy. I like Tosches' hardboiled style (although sometimes I read a paragraph two or three times and didn't know what in the hell he was saying) and he's done a lot of research. But there are so many omissions! How could he leave out virtually all mention of Muhammad Ali's emergency surgery that delayed the second Liston-Ali fight? Sonny was in the best shape of his career going into that fight, but after Ali's surgery, Liston just sort of gave up, looked bloated by the time he showed up in Maine. Liston may have taken a dive in the second Ali fight, but the first one? That's a bit of a stretch when you've read (as I have) at length about what happened during that fight. I can't quite accept a deal cut between the Mob and the Nation of Islam, either. That's just weird. Also, Tosches, I believe, left out one of Sonny's best all time lines: After seeing a performance of the Beatles in 1964 in Miami, Liston said, "My dog can play drums better than that kid with the big nose." How could you omit a nugget like that from a biography?...And yet, I still like this book for what it is: Tosches' rap on Sonny. It's a good rap.
Rating:
Summary: I'm Going to Vote with the "Ayes" on This One
Review: 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
Rating:
Summary: It's A Devil of a Good Book...
Review: Nick Tosches attempts to take us into the world of what was Sonny Liston and help us get to know the man in death that nobody really knew in life. Tosches nails the Liston mystique and the essence od Sonny Liston in this book. It gives a great account of the early environment that shaped the life and attitude of what would become a brooding, sullen and hated Heavyweight Champion. I am a boxing-historian who has studied boxing for twenty years and there are some revelations in this book that I had never heard of. Tosches has done his homework and talked to all the people he could that are still alive that could tell Liston's tale of woe. It's not a particularly happy tale, and there is no happy-ending in this one. It's a story of a man who was controlled in one way another his entire life and was "enslaved" even as Heavyweight Champion of the World. I particularly liked how Tosches covered Liston's life after he slumped into possible drug dealing and shylocking in Las Vegas. It gives a whole new insight into Liston's life and it also helps us understand his idolozing of his boyhood hero Joe Louis. If you're looking for a "Sonny" book this one isn't for you. But, if you want to finally get to know the real Sonny Liston then I recommend it wholeheartedly.
Rating:
Summary: Jim Crow South
Review: Let me get this straight. Nick Tosches would have us believe that Sonny Liston was beating up cops in St. Louis, Missouri in the late 1950's. Does Mr. Tosches know what the South was like between police and Black Men in the 1950's.... Sorry, but I researched Liston just after his death and I don't buy it. I talked to Lem Banker and all the Vegas friends and I'm afraid this tale doesn't ring true. Except for the early Liston family history I don't trust the rest of the story.
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