The Devil and Sonny Liston by Nick Tosches
Requirements: epub/mobi Reader, 603kb
Overview: 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.
Genre: Non-Fiction, Biography
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