A memoir, history, and critical essay in one, sure to captivate anyone who’s ever pumped—or dreamed of pumping—iron.
A self-described “meathead” writes compellingly about the world of bodybuilding.
“I am trying to get Big, and doing it very much on purpose. No, I am not sure why. Yes, you can feel my arm.” So writes Brodeur, who, at a glance, might seem an unlikely candidate for bodybuilding: He is, after all, the classical music critic for the Washington Post. But there’s more to bodybuilding than meets the eye. It’s the locus of a gay subculture, a highly visible means of self-expression, and a way of both adopting and subverting he-man ideals—and besides, “I also really love how my ass looks.” Brodeur takes readers on a wide-ranging tour of lifting and the cultural factors that propel “the long physical and psychological road of consciously building one’s body.” One is the world of childhood, in which many boys played with musclemen dolls and unconsciously absorbed their physical ideals; another was the openness of the bodybuilding culture to those who were once the “klutzes who sucked very conspicuously at team sports and grew up to opt for the weight room over the battlefield or the ball field.” Brodeur is consistently funny, but he is also a cleareyed student of the culture with a trove of trivia to fall back on: Who knew that Lou Ferrigno’s Incredible Hulk body double was a Black bodybuilder (no matter, since the filmmakers decided “green is green”) or that some current bodybuilding ideals can be traced to Dutch Renaissance art? Allowing that there are all sorts of prejudices against it, Brodeur, in the end, delivers a host of good reasons for picking up the weights and putting those muscles to work.
A memoir, history, and critical essay in one, sure to captivate anyone who’s ever pumped—or dreamed of pumping—iron.Pub Date: May 28, 2024
ISBN: 9780807059364
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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