Muhammad Ali was pushing 60 when I saw him on the Today Show. Matt Lauer asked Ali what he considered to be his greatest accomplishment in or out of the ring. -Beating Sonny Liston, - was the response. Surprised by the answer, Lauer asked the question again, putting more emphasis on the out of the ring part. -Beating Sonny Liston, - Ali said, as matter-of-factly as he did the first time. Gilbert Rogin's characterization of Liston as -the nearest piece of talent to Godzilla- was the way most boxing people felt about Sonny before and while he was champion. Angelo Dundee said Liston stood over the heavyweight division like -a colossus.- When Joe Louis said, -Nobody's gonna beat Liston 'cept old age, - there was no reason to think otherwise. And then the impossible happened. Sonny took the biggest fall in the history of sports. In a span of fifteen months in the mid-1960's, heavyweight champion Charles -Sonny- Liston went from being unbeatable to being unmercifully seen as a pariah. Today, the memories of Liston are little more than a footnote to Muhammad Ali's career. The photograph of Ali standing over Liston has defined Sonny for half a century. It has so obscured his talent and character that people seem far more interested in knowing how Sonny died than how he lived. Sonny Liston In A New Light is a penetrating look at boxing's first super heavyweight, a man who was tagged as too big, too black and too fierce for most of America in the 1950's and 1960's. This is the story of who Sonny Liston really was and a remarkable glimpse into who he has become. It is unlike any book you have ever read.

Sheds new light on Liston's tragic life and his extraordinary boxing career.

The anti-Ali, Sonny Liston represents everything that is compelling and terrifying about boxing. An overwhelmingly powerful fighter, Liston rose from a desperately poor childhood to street criminal to world heavyweight champion. He then became the pawn of a series of criminal organizations and was shadowed throughout his life by government investigations, arrests, and the rumor of corruption. The Devil and Sonny Liston is not just the biography of a boxer; it is one of the greatest organized-crime stories ever told and confirms Toschess place as one of the most powerful and original writers of our time. Toschess acclaimed biography of Dean Martin, Dino, sold more than 110,000 copies From the rappers Wu-Tang Clan to writer Thom Jones, people are fascinated by Sonny Liston and by boxing in general. King of the World by David Remnick sold more than 100,000 copies. Tom Cruises Cruise/Wagner Productions is at work on a movie based on this book. A collection of Toschess best writing, The Nick Tosches Reader, is due out in 2000. Tosches is a contributing editor of Vanity Fair.

The author's world encompasses dilapidated fight arenas, state mental hospitals & chaotic emergency rooms. The inhabitants are his brilliantly etched characters, who battle desperately against fate in a game of life they cannot win but dare not lose. As we approach the end of the century & the millennium, no one writes better or more vividly than Jones does about the personal, private apocalypses we all face in our darkest moments. In one story, a Vietnam vet, a Recon Marine, swims alone across the English Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, & the Bosporus to maintain "the edge" that kept him alive in wartime - & that is all he now has left. In another, a brilliant doctor verges on a breakdown. In the title story, a young amateur fighter stoically endures repetitive beatings because he knows the world of boxing shields & protects him from the even crueler world outside of the ring. A number of these stories have appeared in different forms in the New Yorker, Playboy, & Esquire.

Winner of the Western States Book Award for poetry, Flying Over Sonny Liston explores with courage, compassion, and bone-deep wisdom the complicated and some times heartbreaking task of being human in the modern world, in the modern West. Whether he writes about the tortuous interior landscape of the family or the vast and often abused terrain of the Nevada desert, Gary Short is unfailingly honest, tender, and gifted with a vision for the all-revealing detail, the larger, wrenching truth. Although many of the poems are about death or express a deep and painful anger, the book is about survival. We often find in these poems a movement from the dark into a blazing light of realization that acts as a counter to sorrow, from comprehension to forgiveness, and an awareness that the daunting challenge of being human is won not in loud victories but through the delicate graces of mercy, trust, and hope.

Based on more than 500 interviews, including Muhammad Ali's closest associates, and enhanced by access to thousands of pages of newly released FBI records, this is a thrilling story of a man who became one of the great figures of the twentieth century.​

One of the most recognisable, respected and inspirational men on earth, Muhammad Ali is the world's most famous boxing hero. Ali brought unprecedented speed and grace to the sport, and his charm and wit changed forever what the world expects of a champion athlete. In the words of over two hundred of Ali's family members, associates, opponents, friends and enemies, this comprehensive and honest portrait relates his legendary sporting accomplishments, as well as the high drama of life outside the boxing ring. From Olympic gold in Rome, to stunning victory over George Foreman in Zaire, every historic victory and defeat of Ali's career is covered. His controversial embrace of the Nation of Islam - with the renunciation of his 'slave name', Cassius Clay - and the historic refusal to be inducted into the US Army makes for compelling reading. Ali became America's first national conscientious objector, and with a willingness to stage his fights in Third World locales, he continued his advocacy for people in need which was honoured in 2000 when he became a United Nations Messenger of Peace. Charismatic, dedicated and a skilful self-publicist, Ali is the living embodiment of the American Dream. This is the biography to match his achievements.