| | | The Devil and Sonny Liston |
Author: Nick Tosches
Hardcover · April 2000
272 Pages
He beat up Floyd Patterson, the man White America considered a credit to their race. He took two dives against Ali, the man Black America considered a symbol to their race. He appeared before two separate congressional committees and was run out of St. Louis and Chicago by the police. He loved children and emptied his pockets to the destitute. He was a rapist.Sonny Liston Biography
Tosches lays bare the tumultuous life and inevitable death of the original Mike Tyson. His portrait of a modern day Goliath, whose appetite for destruction and chaos led to his death, is a modern classic, rendering complete this son of a sharecropper's doomed existance.
Liston was a more complex man than his image allowed, a man America's appetites were not ready for, and whose antics were not viewed through the fisheye lens with which we view Tyson. He was the dark figure in the alley we all feared.
If Ali is a symbol of all that is principled about boxing, Liston's life represents all that is nasty, brutish, and short. Were it not for the unscrupulous mobsters who managed his life, and this illiterate ex-con's simple, carnal desires, thuggery may well have triumphed.
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Sonny Liston Biography
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