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.

A biography of the controversial fighter follows Liston from the mean streets where he was a petty criminal, to the heavyweight championship and the tragic end of his life.

A forgotten singer from the early days of jazz is at the center of this riveting book -- a narrative that is part mystery, part biography, part meditation on the meaning and power of music.

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In 1962, Sonny Liston became boxing's world heavyweight champion. He was a poor plantation boy and a bruiser for the mob who had done time for armed robbery, but he had fought his way to the top. Those he met in the ring said he was unstoppable, even dangerous. Sonny, however, knew differently.

From dealing blackjack in the small-time gangster town of Steubenville, Ohio, to carousing with the famous "Rat Pack" in a Hollywood he called home, Dean Martin lived in a grandstand, guttering life of booze, broads, and big money. He rubbed shoulders with the mob, the Kennedys, and Hollywood's biggest stars. He was one of America's favorite entertainers. But no one really knew him. Now Nick Tosches reveals the man behind the image--the dark side of the American dream. It's a wild, illuminating, sometimes shocking tale of sex, ambition, heartaches--and a life lived hard, fast, and without apologies.

The bestselling biography of Muhammad Ali--with an Introduction by Salman Rushdie On the night in 1964 that Muhammad Ali (then known as Cassius Clay) stepped into the ring with Sonny Liston, he was widely regarded as an irritating freak who danced and talked way too much. Six rounds later Ali was not only the new world heavyweight boxing champion: He was "a new kind of black man" who would shortly transform America's racial politics, its popular culture, and its notions of heroism. No one has captured Ali--and the era that he exhilarated and sometimes infuriated--with greater vibrancy, drama, and astuteness than David Remnick, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lenin's Tomb (and editor of The New Yorker). In charting Ali's rise from the gyms of Louisville, Kentucky, to his epochal fights against Liston and Floyd Patterson, Remnick creates a canvas of unparalleled richness. He gives us empathetic portraits of wisecracking sportswriters and bone-breaking mobsters; of the baleful Liston and the haunted Patterson; of an audacious Norman Mailer and an enigmatic Malcolm X. Most of all, King of the World does justice to the speed, grace, courage, humor, and ebullience of one of the greatest athletes and irresistibly dynamic personalities of our time.