Announcements
Mark Kriegel and Rosie Perez Talk Mike Tyson on June 4
New York’s own Mark Kriegel and Rosie Perez will team up to present a one-of-a-kind conversation about Kriegel’s new book on Mike Tyson, sponsored by Greenlight Bookstore at St. Joseph’s University in Brooklyn on June 4, and you are invited.
The program marks the official launch of Kriegel’s new book, Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson, which debuts on June 3. Kriegel will discuss the book with Brooklyn native, actor, and ‘First Lady of Boxing’ Rosie Perez. The discussion will include audience Q&A and a book signing.
Tickets are just $5 and can be purchased on the Greenlight Bookstore website here.
Mark Kriegel Takes On The Myth of Mike Tyson
Mark Kriegel’s new book, Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson, is out June 3.
Kriegel, former sports columnist for the New York Post and the Daily News and boxing analyst and essayist for ESPN, is acclaimed as the “finest boxing writer in America.” Kriegel’s coverage of Mike Tyson dates back to the 1980s. The book Baddest Man tells the story of Tyson as a parable about fame, race, greed, criminality, and trauma, through the creation of the most feared and mesmerizing fighter in boxing history.
Kriegel covers Tyson as an icon in American culture and the American psyche. As history circles and repeats itself, infamous New York real estate development Donald Trump makes his appearance in the book when he hosted celebrities and high rollers on the Jersey Shore more four decades ago to bask in the glow created by then 21-year-old heavyweight champion Tyson as he knocked out Michael Spinks in just 91 seconds, making more than the annual payrolls of the Los Angeles Lakers’ and Boston Celtics’ players combined.
Both HBO Boxing and Donald Trump rode Mike Tyson’s coattails to fame.
Tyson and boxing’s forgotten wizard, trainer Cus D’Amato, became an irresistible story of mutual redemption. Novelists, screenwriters, and newspapermen had always been drawn to D’Amato, and cable television and Tyson resurrected D’Amato’s fame, and Mike Tyson became HBO’s leading man.
But the backstage story was full of inconvenient truths darker and more nuanced than the script would allow. Kriegel brings those truths into the light in his new book while humanizing Tyson as a man, not the legend.
Kriegel was a young cityside reporter at the New York Daily News when he was first swept up in the Tyson media hurricane. A lot has changed since then. Today, he measures his subject not by whom he knocked out, but by what he survived.
Reviews for Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson
“Mark Kriegel has done it again. Baddest Man is the Mike Tyson book all of us (and not just boxing fans) have been waiting for, a biography as nimble and powerful as its subject. Unforgettable.” —Jonathan Eig, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of King: A Life and Ali: A Life
“Themes of race, power, and wealth are prevalent in Tyson’s life, especially when others, realizing his potential, began making decisions on his behalf. Love him or hate him, Tyson’s story is interesting, and Kriegel highlights the man behind his public persona. An obvious choice for Tyson fans and readers interested in boxing, who will appreciate Kriegel’s focus on the sport’s history and the fighters who influenced it.” —Booklist
“An unflinching glimpse into the formative years of a troubled boxing great.” —Publishers Weekly
“Mark Kriegel, one of America’s finest living sportswriters, has found the perfect subject in Mike Tyson, a figure of endless fascination and yet enduring mystery. Who else but Kriegel—an old-school reporter with a novelist’s touch and feel for the human condition—could peel back the decades of villainization, self-mythology, and shtick that have obscured the story of the rise of the most famous fighter since Muhammad Ali? Gritty, soaring, searing, and funny, Baddest Man is the best sports biography I have read in years.” —Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning
“In clear, tough, impassioned prose, Mark Kriegel, who understands the sausage factory of professional boxing better than anyone on earth, gives us the deep inside of Mike Tyson’s psyche, and of the needs and fantasies of all who have clung to him: the lovers, the operators, the hangers-on, the sportswriters, and us, a public feasting on what we imagine him to be.” —James Kaplan, author of 3 Shades of Blue, Sinatra: The Chairman, and Frank: The Voice
“Few events represented the grandiosity and excess of the 1980s more than a Mike Tyson prizefight. Where else could one find Don King and Donald Trump vying for the same microphone? Tyson did not craft his legend alone. Mark Kriegel delivers a book that only he can by introducing the facilitators, backslappers, and those who looked the other way to capitalize on Tyson’s rapid rise. This is an experience Kriegel lived as a reporter and one brought to life for the reader—you can smell the sweat of a decaying gym and hear the thud of a sharp Tyson body blow throughout the lively pages.” —Jonathan Abrams, New York Times bestselling author
