by Jonathan Black ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2013
A must-read for fitness buffs and beefy enough to whet the appetite of even the most inert couch potato.
With an investigative journalist’s penchant for exposing the underside of popular movements, Black (Yes, You Can! Behind the Hype and Hustle of the Motivation Biz, 2006) presents an engrossing history of fitness in the United States.
While offering largely a chronology of the evolution of a uniquely American brand of fitness, Black is quick to provide scintillating glimpses into the lives of fitness icons and explore philosophical trends and lucrative business models. From a sweeping portrait of 19th-century bodybuilding to 20th-century exercise champions, who “figured large in the early use of television” and “helped spawn the videotape industry,” to contemporary entrepreneurs who fashioned the multibillion-dollar health club, athletic shoe and exercise equipment industries, a fascinating window into American values emerges. Black convincingly argues that while modern notions of the “perfect” body may derive from the sculpted male form idolized in classical Greece and the importance of sound physical health from ancient Egypt, China and the Indus Valley, it was the rise of Victorian attitudes that helped infuse into the American bent for physical fitness a notion of moral health. Concepts like mid-19th-century “muscular Christianity” espoused by YMCA founders stressed that “bodily vigor is a moral agent” and promoted the acquisition of physical strength in the service of protecting the weak. It may seem somewhat ironic that bodybuilding, a largely aesthetic pursuit that traces its roots to this period, emerged from a moral imperative. However, by assembling the biographies of scrawny, sickly and/or relatively obscure youths who went on to become fitness legends—Eugen Sandow, Charles Atlas, Jack LaLanne, Bonnie Prudden, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jane Fonda, Richard Simmons and legions more—Black effectively shows how the drive for personal transformation is right in step with the American dream.
A must-read for fitness buffs and beefy enough to whet the appetite of even the most inert couch potato.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8032-4370-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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