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
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 Yorkerstaff 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
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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