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
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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