Hero's Body

By: William Giraldi

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Paperback | 24 July 2017

At a Glance

Paperback
320 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
19.9 x 12.9 x 2.1

Paperback

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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.

Industry Reviews

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 *

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