Kriegel’s books include a Steeltown Trilogy (Namath, Pistol and The Good Son), plenty about fathers and sons, men who became mythic, and the price they each paid.
A magnificent noir epic about fame, race, greed, criminality, trauma, and the creation of the most feared and mesmerizing fighter in boxing history.
“The most nuanced, most human portrait of Tyson ever created.”
In the early 1980s, as America’s steel towns turned to rust, Ray Mancini became just the kind of hero the nation needed — not merely a champion, but to millions of Americans, the real-life Rocky. Then it all came undone in a single afternoon, the day he fought Duk Koo Kim at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.
“If The Good Son is a sports book, it’s the best I’ve ever read.”
A basketball prodigy created by his father, “Pistol” changed the game — but the price was immense.
“Mark Kriegel has written the sports-bio equivalent of Maravich on a fast break: dazzling and smart, and, even at 381 pages, over before you knew it.”
Set in Greenwich Village in the 1970s and ’80s, it’s the tale of a mob soldier, his surviving son, and the way he betrayed them both. It’s also a love song to New York.
“There are moments in this book, about boxing, about the nature of masculine fear, that are quite unlike anything I’ve ever read or seen or heard.”