The Hero's Body

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.