Warm, likable and polite, Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini was everyone's favorite boxer in the early 1980s. The lightweight champ's story--he fought to fulfill the dreams of a father whose career had been cut short by a war injury--made for great TV, and his handsome, Italian-American features offered the public a real-life Rocky Balboa. But a pall was cast over his career and, ultimately, over boxing itself when South Korean fighter Duk Koo Kim died from injuries sustained in a 1982 title fight with Mancini.
In The Good Son, Mark Kriegel, a sports journalist and author of biographies of Joe Namath and Pete Maravich, balances the intrinsic drama of Mancini's story with a graceful, contemplative tone that examines how Mancini went from a lovable sports celebrity to a symbol of boxing's brutality. Kriegel takes the reader back through the generations to see where Mancini got the fortitude to endure in the ring, but avoids hero-worshipping or mythologizing a fighter who by all accounts had solid, but not extraordinary, talents. Instead, The Good Son reveals a remarkably human guy whose rise--and fall--resulted more from vagaries of fate and circumstance than superhuman drive or destiny.
Kriegel offers a welcome chapter on Kim--whose own hardscrabble upbringing dwarfs what Mancini had to overcome--but keeps a nuanced eye on his subject. The Good Son is a thoughtful, fully realized biography that convincingly illustrates how grief, the aura of death and the public's souring affections are complicated burdens for a rather simple man. --Cherie Ann Parker, freelance journalist and book critic