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A memoir of motorcycles and muscles, of obsession and grief, and of a young man who learned how to stay alive through literature.
At just forty-seven years old, William Giraldi's father was killed in a horrific motorcycle crash while racing on a country road. This tragedy, which forever altered the young Giraldi and devastated his family, provides the pulse for The Hero's Body.
In the tradition of Andre Dubus III's Townie, this is a deep-seeing investigation into two generations of men from the working-class town of Manville, New Jersey, including Giraldi's own forays into obsessive bodybuilding as a teenager desperate to be worthy of his family's pitiless, exacting codes of manhood. Lauded by The New Yorker for his "unrelenting, perfectly paced prose," Giraldi writes here with daring, searing honesty about the fragility and might of the American male. An unflinching memoir of luminous sorrow, a son's tale of a lost father and the ancient family strictures of extreme masculinity, The Hero's Body is a work of lasting beauty by one of our most fearless writers.
"Starred Review. A hearty, bittersweet familial chronicle of masculinity drawing on the underappreciated bond between fathers and sons." - Kirkus
"Giraldi obsessively scrutinizes the accident as he traces its reverberations across his family, but his father remains opaque. Nevertheless, his narrative provides remarkable insight into the often-stereotyped world of bodybuilding. " - Publishers Weekly
"This highly recommended book is for anyone who wishes to better understand the male ego, the desire for sheer masculinity, and the need for speed." - Library Journal
This information about The Hero's Body was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
William Giraldi is the author of the critically hailed novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, and the memoir, The Hero's Body. He is fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University. He lives in Boston with his wife and sons.
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