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Warren Zevon wrote a tribute song. Sylvester Stallone produced his life story as a movie of the week. In the 1980s, Ray Boom Boom Mancini wasn't merely the lightweight champ. An adoring public considered him a national hero, the real Rocky. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eBut it all came apart on November 13, 1982, in a brutal battle at Caesars Palace in Las Vegas. Mancini's obscure Korean challenger, Duk Koo Kim, went down in the fourteenth round and never regained consciousness. Three months later, Kim's despondent mother took her own life. The deaths would haunt Ray and ruin his carefully crafted image, suddenly transforming boxing's All-American Boy into a pariah. 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It's the stuff of classic novels: the story of a boy transformed by his father's dream and the cost of that dream. Even as Pete Maravich became Pistol Pete a basketball icon for baby boomers all the Maraviches paid a price. Now acclaimed author Mark Kriegel has brilliantly captured the saga of an American family: its rise, its apparent ruin, and, finally, its redemption. \u003cbr\u003eAlmost four decades have passed since Maravich entered the national consciousness as basketball's boy wizard. No one had ever played the game like the kid with the floppy socks and shaggy hair. And all these years later, no one else ever has. The idea of Pistol Pete continues to resonate with young people today just as powerfully as it did with their fathers. \u003cbr\u003eIn averaging 44.2 points a game at Louisiana State University, he established records that will never be broken. But even more enduring than the numbers was the sense of ecstasy and artistry with which he played. 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Do not think of this as a boxing book, but boxing does make a colorful and primal backdrop for a uniquely American book, filled with enough mentors and monsters to do any Dickens novel justice.\" \u003cb\u003e--\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e From the acclaimed \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e bestselling author whose coverage of Mike Tyson and his inner circle dates back to the 1980s, a magnificent noir epic about fame, race, greed, criminality, trauma, and the creation of the most feared and mesmerizing fighter in boxing history.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e On an evening that defined the \"greed is good\" 1980s, Donald Trump hosted a raft of celebrities and high rollers in a carnival town on the Jersey Shore to bask in the glow created by a twenty-one-year-old heavyweight champion. 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The priest struggles with a way to tell the cops about a possibly incriminating gun without breaking the Seal of Confession by which he's bound. There's so much nuance in the novel that the mystery, which opens the story, becomes a subplot. Saulino (Framily, 2014) aptly develops Father Tony's family, everyone getting together often to chew over the ongoing World Series or favorite episodes of Seinfeld. The forbidden romance between Tony and Donna is also forever on the priest's mind, all the more challenging once physical allure evolves into admissions of love. Tony learning of a probable suspect in Angela's murder and his resultant dilemma, though certainly intriguing, never fully overtake the plot from the protagonist's other troubles. 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