SOURCE: Barnard, Matt. “Boxing Clever.” New Statesman (26 February 1999): 57.

In the following review, Barnard offers a lukewarm review of Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine.

Thom Jones belongs to the American tradition in which the writer and the writing are inseparable. Every review or profile or television interview with the writer tends to recount the facts of his life like a mantra: that Jones is a Vietnam vet, a boxer, an epileptic who spent several years in psychiatric wards, a drop-out who worked as a high-school janitor.

Most of these experiences inform Jones' stories; and yet the one autobiographical subject that does not make it into his fiction is the master's degree in creative writing he received at the famous University of Iowa writer's workshop. It is not something that sits comfortably with the man-on-the-wild-side-of-things myth.

On the famous cover of Walt Whitman's epic Song of Myself is...