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
An authoritative guide leads an illuminating journey into the distant past.
A noted Egyptologist follows the search for burial sites.
Former director of the Egypt Exploration Society and president of the International Association of Egyptologists, Naunton has presented his research in several TV documentaries, most recently King Tut’s Tomb: The Hidden Chamber (2016). He makes his book debut with an insightful, informative, and beautifully illustrated overview of archaeologists’ quests to find the tombs of some of the most famous individuals of the ancient world—Imhotep, Nefertiti, Cleopatra, and the Macedonian leader Alexander the Great foremost among them—that so far have eluded discovery. Along with chronicling expeditions, Naunton provides colorful biographies of these major historical figures and the world they inhabited. The 19th-century craze for Egyptian antiquities resulted in major finds, but despite two centuries of efforts, much has not been revealed. Of the tombs that have been discovered over the years, the author notes that many have been found empty, plundered by robbers lusting after the considerable wealth buried with the mummified corpse. Some robberies, he speculates, were likely carried out by the same people who buried the deceased or by workers involved in the construction of a new tomb that opened accidentally into the old one. Naunton vividly describes the sumptuous riches of burial sites: In 1939, for example, a team under the direction of French archaeologist Pierre Montet discovered a royal tomb containing a “falcon-headed coffin of solid silver,” a solid gold funerary mask, a scarab of lapis lazuli, and objects made of other precious materials. The following year, his team discovered a mummy “wrapped in almost unimaginable riches,” including 22 bracelets, solid gold toe and finger rings, and jeweled weapons, amulets, and canes. While it seems mysterious that the tombs of famous individuals should remain hidden, Naunton suggests that ancient “waves of rebuilding,” sieges, geological changes, and recent redevelopment have caused sites to be obscured. The tomb of Cleopatra and, perhaps, Marc Antony, for example, may lie buried in the sea, off the coast of Alexandria.
An authoritative guide leads an illuminating journey into the distant past.Pub Date: Nov. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-500-05199-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Thames & Hudson
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2018
Bernstein and Woodward, the two Washington Post journalists who broke the Big Story, tell how they did it by old fashioned seat-of-the-pants reporting — in other words, lots of intuition and a thick stack of phone numbers. They've saved a few scoops for the occasion, the biggest being the name of their early inside source, the "sacrificial lamb" H**h Sl**n. But Washingtonians who talked will be most surprised by the admission that their rumored contacts in the FBI and elsewhere never existed; many who were telephoned for "confirmation" were revealing more than they realized. The real drama, and there's plenty of it, lies in the private-eye tactics employed by Bernstein and Woodward (they refer to themselves in the third person, strictly on a last name basis). The centerpiece of their own covert operation was an unnamed high government source they call Deep Throat, with whom Woodward arranged secret meetings by positioning the potted palm on his balcony and through codes scribbled in his morning newspaper. Woodward's wee hours meetings with Deep Throat in an underground parking garage are sheer cinema: we can just see Robert Redford (it has to be Robert Redford) watching warily for muggers and stubbing out endless cigarettes while Deep Throat spills the inside dope about the plumbers. Then too, they amass enough seamy detail to fascinate even the most avid Watergate wallower — what a drunken and abusive Mitchell threatened to do to Post publisher Katherine Graham's tit, and more on the Segretti connection — including the activities of a USC campus political group known as the Ratfuckers whose former members served as a recruiting pool for the Nixon White House. As the scandal goes public and out of their hands Bernstein and Woodward seem as stunned as the rest of us at where their search for the "head ratfucker" has led. You have to agree with what their City Editor Barry Sussman realized way back in the beginning — "We've never had a story like this. Just never."
Pub Date: June 18, 1974
ISBN: 0671894412
Page Count: 372
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1974
SEEN & HEARD
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