MixedThe Los Angeles Review of BooksGiraldi does some of his best writing when calling out the reader’s impulse to see the oiled men and women on the pages of Flex magazine as freaks tampering with nature ... there isn’t a sentence in The Hero’s Body that lacks vigor or limps onto the page. His prose is sonorously throttled like a twin-barrel exhaust...it’s also here that the memoir begins to grind. The revved up language and etymological inquiries feel like an overcompensation, a writer consciously pausing to flex some linguistic muscle, and the pace of the narrative slows considerably.
