The Catskills Camp

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.