It’s been years since I’ve read a book of narrative nonfiction as honest, compassionate, and wise as Michael Copperman’s Seeking Kenny: A Wrestler’s Journey. A journalistic investigation, a tender biography, a wise meditation on sport, persistence, faith, the natural world, and the search for meaning—this is a book I’m going to hand to my sixteen-year-old son. This is a book, I’m going to tell him, that will help you become a man, become a better man.
-Joe Wilkins, author of The Entire Sky
Joe Wilkins’s collection of essays, Every Sky at Home: Essays on Landscape and Family, is forthcoming in September 2026.