Baddest Man: The Making of Mike Tyson

＂Long before anyone heard of Tony Soprano, Mike Tyson was HBO’s leading man. It was the greatest sales job in the sport’s history, and the most lucrative. But the business of Tyson concealed truths that were darker and more nuanced than the script would allow. The intervening decades have seen Tyson villainized, lionized, and fetishized--but never, until now, fully humanized. Mark Kriegel ... was a young cityside reporter at the New York Daily News when first swept up in the Tyson media hurricane, but here measures his subject not by whom he knocked out, but by what he survived. Though Tyson was billed as a modern-day Jack Dempsey, the truth was closer to Sonny Liston. Tyson was Black, feared, and born to die young. What made Liston a pariah, though, would make Tyson--in a way his own handlers could never understand--a touchstone for a generation raised on a soundtrack of hip hop and gunfire＂--

Mark Kriegel, a former sports columnist for the New York Post and the Daily News, is a boxing analyst and essayist for ESPN. He is the author of Namath: A Biography, Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich and The Good Son: The Life of Ray ＂Boom Boom＂ Mancini. He lives in Santa Monica, California, with his wife, the screenwriter Jenny Lumet.