Book No. 6: The Devil and Sonny Liston by Nick Tosches



This is the best Tosches book I've read thus far. The arc of Sonny Liston's life is laid out as a tragedy on the grand scale. The marriage of boxing, mafia, and race relations in the mid-20th century are the real story here, playing Liston like more rook than pawn, pushing him forward in straight lines towards some goal that he could not possibly understand. Someone should write an opera.