A funny, informative history of a true American eccentric and the national preoccupation with health and fitness.
The long life and strange times of the forgotten Father of Physical Culture.
New York magazine columnist Adams spins a lively yarn in this biography of pioneering health-and-fitness guru Bernarr Macfadden. In the first half of the 20th century, he was one of the most famous men in America, a confidant of Rudolph Valentino and Eleanor Roosevelt celebrated and scorned in equal measure for his radical theories—which earned him the undying enmity of the American Medical Association—and his tabloid publishing empire. In brisk prose, Adams charts the remarkable trajectory of sickly orphan Bernard McFadden (he changed his name to make it sound more distinctive), a singularly dynamic and driven character devoted to the idea that a healthy mind, body and spirit are moral imperatives and attainable only through severe calorie restriction and grueling, regular physical exercise. With the passion of a true zealot, Macfadden promulgated his theories through his vastly influential magazine, Physical Culture, and an ever-expanding empire of health farms and sanitariums. His efforts profoundly influenced the national psyche, birthing the multibillion-dollar fitness industry that flourishes to this day. Equally fascinating is Macfadden’s publishing legacy, which included the ahead-of-their-time salacious tabloids The New York Evening Graphic (Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan were on the writing staff) and True Story (the source of most of Macfadden’s fortune). He also discovered and promoted legendary bodybuilder Charles Atlas. Adams paints Macfadden as a bizarre, outsized figure: Married four times, he philandered well into old age; a multimillionaire, he dressed like a hobo and regularly walked dozens of miles per day through the streets of New York…barefoot; he practiced his theories of eugenics on his children; and, after repeatedly failing to attain high political office, he founded his own religion, “Cosmotarianism.”
A funny, informative history of a true American eccentric and the national preoccupation with health and fitness.Pub Date: March 17, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-059475-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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