Mark Kriegel is the author of two critically acclaimed bestsellers, Namath: A Biography and Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich. He is a veteran columnist and a commentator for the NFL Network. He lives with his daughter, Holiday, in Santa Monica, California.
"Masterful."
*Los Angeles Times*
"Superb."
*Boston Globe*
"The best sports biographer we have today."
*The Buffalo News*
“A timeless mythic tale of fathers and sons . . . Kriegel’s
reporting is impeccable, his passion muted but no less heartfelt
for that. It takes one hell of a writer—period—to handle so rich a
mix of manhood, legacy, and blood sport with such grace.”
*Scott Raab, Esquire, Best Books of the Year*
“An absorbing blend of psychological drama and fearless reportage,
Kriegel deconstructs the sprawling consequences of that fateful day
at Caesars Palace, driving at the heart of where the heady
romanticism and stark reality of the cruelest sport converge.”
*Sports Illustrated, Best Books of the Year*
“With The Good Son, Kriegel plays a long shot and wins a unanimous
decision. . . . Kriegel knows how to set up a good emotional punch,
and plays on the major themes of Mancini’s life like a master
novelist.”
*Allen Barra, Chicago Tribune*
“Goes so deep into the history and entanglement of the
dysfunctional and violence-based immigrant Mancini family and the
men who strived to make their mark within it, that it reads like
something Dostoyevsky might have served up, had he been a
modern-day sportswriter.”
*Chicago Sun Times*
“Our American literary tradition happily disregards the
intellectuals and cherishes the sportswriters. As we should, for
the great sportswriter combines the fan’s love of American Culture
with the scribe’s intuition of tragedy. Or, as Red Smith, Damon
Runyon, or Bill Heinz might have put it: ‘Kriegel does for Boom
Boom what Margaret Mitchell did for the Civil War.’”
—David Mamet
“As told by Mark Kriegel, the true tale of Boom Boom Mancini is one
of blood and spirit, of the ghosts bequeathed from fathers to sons,
from pugilists to their progeny. If The Good Son is a sports book,
it’s the best I’ve ever read. Either way, in any genre, it is
masterful storytelling.”
—David Milch
“The Good Son is muscular, literary sportswriting at its best,
which is what we've come to expect from Mark Kriegel. But it's also
much, much more. Here is the story not just of the rise and fall of
a great prizefighter from a hard-luck industrial town—rendered,
throughout, with tremendous heart—but of fathers and sons, (and
brothers), of America's hunger for mythic heroes, of the tragic
collision of two lives. It's a slender, yet epic book, as graceful,
layered and achingly intimate as the finest novel.”
—Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is
Burning
“It’s easy to say The Good Son will go down as one of the great
boxing books of all time. But in telling the story of Ray (Boom
Boom) Mancini, Mark Kriegel has accomplished something beyond
sports. His book is, put simply, a masterpiece; an ode to
father-son relationships, to the drive and makeup of champions; to
what it is to experience the high of a world championship and the
low of watching an opponent die in the ring. There’s a reason
Kriegel is one of America’s elite biographers. The Good Son is
spectacular.”
—Jeff Pearlman, New York Times bestselling author of Sweetness: The
Enigmatic Life of Walter Payton
"Honestly, it's simply not possible to write a better book—sports,
non-sports, fiction, non-fiction—than The Good Son, Mark Kriegel's
remarkable biography of Boom Boom Mancini, which is by equal turns
uplifting, heartbreaking, cautionary and redemptive. And impossible
to put down."––Mike Vaccaro, New York Post columnist
"Kriegel is a meticulous researcher and gifted interviewer, and, in
this stirring biography, the joy and tragedy experienced by the
Mancini family is palpable—never more than in the account of a
meeting between Kim’s son and Ray 30 years after Kim died at Ray’s
hand. Kriegel picks his subjects carefully and does them justice.
Can there be higher praise for a biographer?"––Booklist, starred
review
"Kriegel’s smoothly written biography tells the story of a rust
belt hero whose boxing career was marred by tragedy in the ring. .
. . as a saga of two families dealing with hardship and violent
death, this boxing history is completely engaging."––Publishers
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