The Hero's Body

Description

At just 47, William Giraldi's father was killed in a motorcycle crash. This tragedy, which forever altered the young Giraldi and devastated his family, provides the pulse for The Hero's Body. This is an investigation into three generations of men from the working-class town of Manville, New Jersey, including Giraldi's own adolescent 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 with searing honesty about the American male.

William Giraldi grew up in Manville, New Jersey, and attended college at Drew University and Boston University. He is author of the novels Busy Monsters and Hold the Dark, fiction editor for the journal AGNI at Boston University, and a contributing editor at The New Republic. He's been granted fellowships from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. His fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Oxford American, The New York Times, The Sun, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Baffler, Ploughshares, The Wall Street Journal, The New Criterion, and online at The Daily Beast and Salon. He lives in Boston with his wife and sons.

Is this the best book I've ever read on the subject of masculinity? Maybe it is -- William Leith * The Spectator * While many of the ideas he raises are universal, The Hero's Body is a somewhat turbocharged, uniquely American take on what it means to be male -- Jack Urwin * The Guardian * I've never read anything like this. Superbly written -- William Leith * Evening Standard * A powerful autobiographical memoir -- David Matthews * Big Issue North * an absorbing memoir [...] Giraldi urges us to put aside our preconceptions and appreciate bodybuilding as an aesthetic pursuit, and the bodybuilder as a kind of 'walking poetry': in his narcissistic perfectionism and emphasis on balance, proportion, rhythm and harmony, he is not unlike the ballerino. -- Houman Barekat * The Times Literary Supplement *