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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.

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