Nick Tosches knows that the seamy side of American life doesn't always play itself out in the corners and the shadows; sometimes it takes the spotlight. He's illustrated this fact in biographies of Dean Martin and Jerry Lee Lewis, each a flawed figure who spent his life peering into his own distinctive abyss: Martin was burdened with a Cassandra-like curse, able to see through the phoniness of show business and recognize himself as the biggest phony of all, while Lewis has been haunted by the knowledge that playing the devil's music could only take him one place, down. It's a different breed of devil, or two breeds, at work in Tosches' latest biography, The Devil And Sonny Liston, another gripping, gracefully written excursion into popular culture's darkest places. Boxing's dominant heavyweight from the late '50s until two mid-'60s defeats by Cassius Clay/Muhammad Ali, Liston spent his life chased by manifestations of an inner devil (prison, alcohol, covered-up sexual assaults) and controlled by a more tangible one. It's one of the sport's worst-kept secrets that the Mafia brought Liston up, and many, including Tosches, speculate that it also brought him down. "The bad guy isn't supposed to win," Liston once said. "I change that." Just as Liston presented himself, Tosches portrays his subject as an unapologetic, indefensibly bad man but also something of a victim, if of nothing other than success. Handled by men worse than himself, Liston was the champ no one wanted, and Tosches makes much of both his general unpopularity and his inability to control his fate. Liston's time passed before his natural ability exhausted itself, and when given the order, he bowed down in both match-ups with Ali. Tellingly, Tosches goes against popular opinion in his portrayal of Liston's successor, whom he sees not as a challenging symbol of African-American independence but as a figure of entertainment far more acceptable to white America than Liston. Unlike the charismatic Ali, Liston had only one gift: the ability to pound opponents like no one else and not think twice about it. Tosches' heavily measured admiration for his subject's odd honesty helps lend his tale emotional gravity that nicely balances his detailed portrayal of Liston's journey through the underworld, a journey that culminated in his mysterious and premature death in 1970. A bad man met a bad end, but there's tragedy in that, too.