Shaun Assael

Admittedly I knew next to nothing about Sonny Liston before I read this book. I'm not much of a sports guru, although I do love boxing movies. All I knew about Sonny Liston was that he was the fallen boxer in the famous photo with Muhammad Ali towering over him. That's it. While this book doesn't go into too much detail about Sonny's early life or early career, it does mention some key facts and picks up the story towards the end of Sonny's life and career. This book doesn't paint a pretty show more picture of anyone but it is a fascinating look at corruption, the mob, heroin, and Las Vegas. The author meticulously puts together all the possible events, people, and circumstances that point to the famous boxer being murdered, even though there was never a homicide investigation. The plot thickens when you realize that virtually no one was straight, not even his wife. While there is no concrete conclusion at the end, readers will draw their own conclusions and in the process learn a great deal about boxing, fight fixing, draft dodgers, heroin, dirty cops, and Las Vegas. Thoroughly engaging, I wish there had been more pictures, but hey, what is a little outside research on my own. show less

This was a pretty good book, lots of facts and background information, but short of some of the revelations about Vince's personal life prior to the '80s it didn't have anything that was really new or groundbreaking to me. It was a big re-hash of most of the information that is pretty much old hat for wrestling fans; from Vince's expansion of WWF, to the steroid trials, to the Monday Night Wars, it was all just another version of the same story. Entertaining, because the source materials is show more very entertaining, but just the same old story with a new voice.

The biggest issue for me was that the author got some pretty simple facts wrong throughout the book and I feel like you can't get that stuff wrong, especially when you're trying to write an expose, if you want to keep your credibility. If I remembered the accurate information without having to look it up, it means that it shouldn't have taken a legit fact-checker more than a few seconds to catch the errors. Inexcusable. show less

The Serial podcast about Adnan Syed's murder conviction sparked a profusion of so-called "true crime" podcasts, many focusing on unsolved murders or assessing whether particular deaths were the result of foul play. While several of those are worth listening to, The Murder of Sonny Liston displays the advantage of the written word.

The question of whether boxer Sonny Liston's heroin overdose was actually a murder has been a subject of speculation for decades. While author Shaun Assael's The show more Murder of Sonny Liston: Las Vegas, Heroin, and Heavyweights can't settle that question, the book portrays a Las Vegas on the verge of its heydays. There's the wealthy casino investors, such as Howard Hughes, and the mob influence in the city. There's the office run by Clark County Sheriff Ralph Lamb, one of the most powerful men in Vegas, if not Nevada. There's the seedy underside of the Las Vegas Police Department in a jurisdictional muddle of the city's explosive growth. There's the de facto segregation of the community. And while Liston spent much of his time in African-American West Las Vegas, the man considered by many to be the angriest black man in America lived in an exclusive area of the city in a home once owned by Debby Reynolds.

Given the poverty in which he grew up, the fact he came into boxing while serving time in the Missouri State Prison and his later addiction to heroin, gentrification wasn't something that fit Liston. The home and opportunities his celebrity brought didn't cast out the variety of shady characters who were regular elements of and influences on his professional and personal life.

Assael clearly portrays these elements of the story. Unfortunately, while there are several candidates who may well have wanted Liston dead, that theme often seems to get lost in the emphasis on Vegas itself. Although Liston's story makes the book a satisfactory read for those interested in him, the book is as much a history of 1960s Las Vegas as a thorough analysis of whether Liston was murdered. In fact, the latter focuses in large part on a police informant's claims some 12 years after Liston's death. At least the detail Assael provides elevates his exploration above the cursory views taken in most genre-related podcasts.

(Originally posted at A Progressive on the Prairie) show less

By now, everyone knows what happens behind the scenes of the WWE ain't kosher! Of course most people hate wrestling, but for a wrestling fan, it is interesting to read about the business side of wrestling that is more ruthless than being thrown through a flaming table. A few facts here are actually wrong and I feel like a loser for knowing those, but some of the business elements are very interesting to discover.