An entertaining narrative of the bodybuilding subculture in America.
A history of the Mr. America pageant, the first major competitive bodybuilding showcase that helped popularize the sport.
Retired professor and bodybuilder Fair’s (Muscletown USA: Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell, 2008, etc.) study is not actually about one specific person. Rather, he focuses on the phenomenon of the first major bodybuilding competition, which paved the way for other competitions like Mr. Universe and Mr. Olympia. The author argues that the “tragic” fate of Mr. America was related to the decline of “Americanism.” Specifically citing the academic movement beginning in the 1960s to decentralize American exceptionalism, Fair believes this cultural context created a fatal erosion of the meaning and identity of what it means to be an American, thereby undercutting the ideals of masculinity embodied by Mr. America in favor of pure mass building to compensate for the “male predicament.” It’s an audacious and provocative argument, and his narrative of bodybuilding culture is informative and engaging. Beginning with Eugen Sandow in the late 19th century, “physical culture” was an outgrowth of neoclassical beliefs in athletics and masculinity. Physical beauty was more than simply vanity but an overall balance of body, mind and soul. However, these ideals would quickly become secondary to the appeal of greater muscularity achieved by Charles Atlas, for instance, preferring muscular proportion and symmetry to strongman displays and weightlifting competitions. The first Mr. America was crowned in 1939, and Fair traces the growth of the competition from the postwar golden years through the 1990s when, driven by promoters’ bloodlust for spectacle, steroid use mired the bodybuilding world in scandal. At the same time, market pressure by other competitions and committee regulations had largely forced Mr. America to the fringes of the culture that had all but forgotten its classical lineage.
An entertaining narrative of the bodybuilding subculture in America.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0292760820
Page Count: 460
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
PROFILES
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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