The Hero's Body
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Bedford Square Publishers
Published:23rd Aug '17
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
The Hero's Body is a memoir of what it means to be a man in modern America.
At just forty-seven years old, William Giraldi's father was killed in a horrific motorcycle accident. Writing here with searing honesty about grief, obsession, shame and identity, he looks back on three generations of men from the blue-collar town of Manville, New Jersey, and tells their stories in tandem: the speed-crazed cult of his father's 'superbikes', each Sunday spent racing fate along the winding back roads of Pennsylvania; the trauma of a son's ultimate loss, and William's attempts to rebuild a self in the manliest costume he knew. For a teen consumed by hardcore bodybuilding, pumping iron was so much more than a sport-it was a hallowed lifeline for a bookish tenth-grader, a way to forge himself a spot amongst his family's imperious patriarchs.
A work of lasting literary beauty, lauded by the New Yorker for its 'unrelenting, perfectly paced prose', The Hero's Body is a tale of the working-class male, the codes of machismo and the unspoken bond between father and son.
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 *
ISBN: 9780857301086
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
320 pages