# The Catskills Camp *A Biography of Mike Tyson* — Legendary Biographies No. 031 - **Subject:** Michael Gerard Tyson - **Written by:** Devon Marable - **Shelf:** Sport / Boxing - **Published:** 2026 - **Extent:** 210 pages, 6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink - **EPUB:** $3.99 — EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books (ISBN 979-8-90623-485-8) - **Audiobook:** $5.99 — Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Gideon Marsh (ISBN 979-8-90623-465-0) Buy it, or read the opening free: volumes/031-the-catskills-camp.html ## About this book November 22, 1986, Las Vegas Hilton, championship night. Mike Tyson, twenty years and four months old, knocks out Trevor Berbick in the second round. He becomes the youngest heavyweight champion in boxing history. By the end of 1988 he has unified the WBA, WBC, and IBF titles. By February 1990 he has lost his belts to Buster Douglas in Tokyo in the biggest upset in heavyweight history. By March 1992 he is in the Indiana Youth Center serving a six-year sentence for the rape of Desiree Washington. Devon Marable's biography opens earlier — in the Brownsville neighborhood of Brooklyn, where Michael Gerard Tyson was born in 1966, the third child of a single mother named Lorna Smith — and follows the arc through the Tryon School for Boys, the long apprenticeship with Cus D'Amato in the Catskills, the 1985 turn pro, the 1986 Berbick victory, the Robin Givens marriage and the 1988 20/20 interview, the Don King years and the financial decimation, the Indianapolis conviction and the six-year sentence, the conversion to Islam at Plainfield Correctional Facility, the 1995 release and the bitten-ear 1997 Holyfield fight, the long bankrupt 2000s, the Hangover rehabilitation, the Mike Tyson Mysteries and the Mike: Undisputed Truth one-man Broadway show, the 2024 exhibition fight against Jake Paul. What emerges is a portrait of the most physically dominant heavyweight champion of the second half of the twentieth century — and a man whose interior the boxing-business apparatus and the criminal-justice system between them did much to make. ## Contents 1. Brownsville 2. Cus 3. The Catskill Education 4. The Father Dies 5. The Amateur 6. The Youngest 7. The Peek-a-Boo at War 8. The Reign of Terror 9. Don King 10. Robin Givens 11. Tokyo 12. The Conviction 13. The Comeback 14. The Ear 15. The Decline 16. The Hangover 17. The Podcast and the Pigeon 18. The Last Fight 19. The Paul Fight ## Questions **Who is The Catskills Camp about?** Michael Gerard Tyson. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Catskills Camp — and the name goes on the line underneath. **Is this an authorised biography?** No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented. **Can I read some of it before buying?** Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,025 words of the book. **How long is it?** About 64,500 words, 19 chapters, 210 pages in the paperback. ## The writer Devon Marable spent a decade as a reporter for ESPN The Magazine before turning his attention to book-length biography. His writing focuses on the complex personal realities of athletes whose public careers dominated headlines while their private struggles and triumphs remained largely unrecorded by the daily press. Through meticulous archival research and deep interviewing, he reconstructs the quiet, human moments behind monumental sports histories. His published titles include The Chicago Compound, The Akron Origin, The Crumlin Plumber, and The Stolen Bicycle. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he spends his free time restoring vintage road bicycles and volunteering at a local youth community center.