Review by New York Times Review
ALTHOUGH I'VE DIPPED into and out of physical training over the last couple of decades, I remain, at nearly 45, gaunt and anemic-looking except for the paunch now oozing its way over my underwear waistband. Yet for the past several months I have been serving as my teenage son's personal trainer, a ludicrous notion considering I know almost nothing about the human body or its workings. Week after week we persist, seeing little progress. What do we hope to achieve? It's a good question. In my case, I hope to slow the degradations of middle age. My son, I think, hopes to jump-start the interest of the fairer sex. For both of us, actual fitness would be a fine byproduct, but it's certainly not the goal. Looking good, to paraphrase the Billy Crystal character Fernando Lamas, is better than feeling good. Our culture claims to celebrate vigor and well-being, yet holds up steroid-addled men and impossibly thin women as models of physical perfection. Those of us unwilling to juice or starve ourselves are left feeling inadequate and confused about why we do not bear any resemblance to the humans we are meant to emulate. Two new books approach these questions from different angles, the first seeking to examine masculine physicality and fragility, the second a thorough history of the activity and business of fitness. William Giraldi's "The Hero's Body" is a two-part memoir, the first recounting Giraldi's immersion in the hypermasculine world of competitive bodybuilding during his teenage years, the second a meditation on his father's death in a motorcycle accident. What links the two is the book's central question: What does it mean to be a man, and specifically, what does it mean to be a Giraldi man? He writes: "As the firstborn son, as the fourth William Giraldi, the pressures were always there, the sense of masculine expectation always acute. But I was the bearer of patrilineal traditions in name only, insufficiently macho and no doubt under suspicion as a potential pansy." Bookish, uninterested in sports and laid up with meningitis at 15, Giraldi decides to "make my own creation myth, to renovate my pathetic vessel into a hero's body." Through his uncle Tony, he discovers the monastic pain of weight lifting, and goes from learning how to bench-press to ingesting the oral androgenic steroid Anadrol (or "Drol") with the ferocity and rapidity of a serious addict. "There's a fetishizing pleasure involved in the accumulation of steroids: the smooth, tiny ampuls,... the syringes of various gauges, packaged like toothbrushes; the bottles of injectable B12 ... that caused a five-minute high, a giggling full-body warmth, as if a tonic lava loose in the blood." Giraldi writes with subtlety about the unsubtle world of clanging metal, exploring with frank tenderness the ways men form friendships and how those friendships can grow into love. "The Hero's Body" is suffused with platonic masculine love, the love of weight lifting buddies and motorcycles and the men who ride them, in particular the author's doomed father. That father, the third William Giraldi, lived the kind of "real American" stoic, blue-collar life so venerated by politicians. Married young, he fathered three children, and started a roofing company with his brother. With his children nearly adult and his wife of 12 years fled, he resumed the motorcycle habit of his younger days, graduating to ever-faster bikes until his final purchase, a Yamaha R1 "superbike" geared more to racing than the road. After the older Giraldi's death, an uncle who now takes motorcycle-racing classes at a local track tells the author how little they all understood the powerful machines they straddled : "Everything was totally wrong. Your father and me, Uncle Tony and Pop - we didn't have the first idea- When you do these track days, you really, really get why so many guys are killed on the road every day. They just have no idea." BUT GIRALDI UNDERSTANDS a deeper truth: These men do have an idea, even if they sometimes have difficulty expressing it. When he asks a friend of his father's why they do it, why they risk their lives at unconscionable speeds every Sunday, the friend answers: "Well, I can't really explain it. It just feels like ... like you're alive for the first time, like you're gonna live forever." Which may be the point of the hero, after all. To be venerated. To be remembered. Giraldi has written a powerful and sympathetic accounting of the lengths men will go to discover themselves through the workings of their fragile and complicated bodies, and the ways they discover hidden strength. Strength, in all of its physical manifestations, forms the basis for "Lift: Fitness Culture, From Naked Greeks and Acrobats to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors," by the writer and editor Daniel Kunitz. An exhaustive catalog of the exhausting, "Lift" is both a history of exercise as self-improvement and a paean to CrossFit, the fad that emphasizes "functional strength" in lieu of bulging muscles. With "Lift," Kunitz tries to do for CrossFit what the best seller "Born to Run" did for the minimalist running movement. The book is organized chronologically, beginning in the dim mists of time before the mighty Schwarzenegger walked the earth. Like Giraldi, Kunitz begins with the Greeks - specifically with the concept of arete, which was the "central ideal of all Greek culture," Kunitz writes (quoting the German classicist Werner Jaeger). "That ideal," he continues, "could only be expressed through a unity of body, mind and soul." In modern terms, we might call this approach "holistic," seeing little difference between exercising the mind and the body. In fact, the gymnasia, where Greeks trained their bodies, "were also the sites of the era's three major philosophical traditions." It is as if college existentialism courses were taught between Soul Cycle classes. The relationship between body and culture runs through "Lift." Kunitz traces the post-Greek decline in physical training to the rise of Christianity, with its "turning away from body culture and toward the cultivation of spiritual exercises." (Thus the image of Jesus as waifish, devoid of pride.) Later, when bodybuilding emerges as a vocation in the 20th century, Kunitz discusses the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk and his idea that "the trend toward bodybuilding is itself an expression of the spirit of capitalism,... the 'inner connection between the worlds of practice and work, of perfection and production.'" Kunitz pays special attention in "Lift" to the rising role of women and feminism. "As aerobics popularized a tighter, more toned look than had been the norm in the slimmed-down '60s and '70s," he notes, "the sudden arrival of female bodybuilding thrust jacked women before the broader public - where they were met with incomprehension, skepticism and revulsion." The book begins with an anecdote about Kunitz's younger cousin, who joins her middle school's weight lifting team: "A generation earlier, when I was her age - and, what's more, for every generation preceding hers down to the beginning of time - a girl wanting to get stronger would have provoked snorts of disapproval." The story becomes dry in places, as when Kunitz enumerates early "variable-resistance pulley-weight machines." And only true weight lifting devotees (say, William Giraldi) will find the history of late-19th-century German gyms edifying. More successful are Kunitz's portraits of the eccentrics who challenged dogma to push sometimes-eccentric notions of fitness and how best to achieve it. Here he quotes Bernarr McFadden, an early bodybuilding advocate who foreshadows the rise of late-night infomercials: "The world has become stupidly complicated. Get outdoors. Forget politics and economics. Don't stand on your rights, stand on your head. Weakness is a crime. Put yourself in my hands, at $110 for the full course." "Lift" works best when it stays personal, as when Kunitz recounts his own entry into what he calls the "new frontier" of exercise, those systems that seek once again to merge the training of body and mind. After I finished "The Hero's Body" and "Lift," I searched for images of both William Giraldi and Daniel Kunitz to see what kind of shape they're in. The answer, to quote Larry David, is "pretty, pretty good." But both certainly erase any lingering stereotypes of musclebound lunkheads, by treating their storytelling with the same care they evidently devote to their biceps and quads. 'The pressures were always there, the sense of masculine expectation always acute/ MICHAEL IAN BLACK is an actor and the author of two memoirs, "Navel Gazing" and "You're Not Doing It Right."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [September 14, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The former editor-in-chief of Modern Painters and an avid CrossFit athlete examines the history of fitness and exercise in this thoroughly researched and highly informative account. Kunitz posits that the popularity of CrossFit and other innovative fitness regimes such as acroyoga, parkour, and bar gymnastics, which he refers to as new frontier fitness, reflect historical strength philosophies that were practiced by the ancient Greeks and others through the early twentieth century. He also profiles countless pioneers in exercise and fitness, including George Barker Winship, a nineteenth-century physician who promoted weight lifting; familiar names like Vic Tanny and Jack LaLanne; and unlikely heroes such as Bonnie Prudden, who promoted families exercising together. Kunitz interweaves his own experiences with CrossFit into the narrative and argues convincingly that the history of striving for ideal physical health reflects a stop-and-start pattern in which periods of dormancy alternate with periods of rediscovered interest. This thoughtful, accessible, and remarkably insightful cultural history of fitness will appeal to anyone who has set foot into a gym or laced up running shoes while wondering, Why am I doing this? --Clark, Craig Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Kunitz, editor-in-chief of Modern Painters magazine, carries out an inquiry into the evolution of fitness and gym culture in this illuminating compendium. The author traces the cultural processes that led to current ideas about fitness, discovering along the way its impact on politics and technology. Writing in lucid anecdotal prose, Kunitz is a master at creating a compelling narrative. This book is divided into 10 substantial chapters on foundational topics, which include ancient ideals of the human form and the idea of making art out of one's own body. Also included is a key segment on the women's movement, which Kunitz credits as "the first mass culture of fitness"; he details the prominent women who revolted against strictures in the 1960s, such as by entering marathons from which they were barred. As we are guided through this timeline, Kunitz includes his own challenges with fitness along the way, making this a book not just for those interested in the roots of fitness, but for anyone who struggles to live healthily. Agent: Edward Orloff, McCormick & Williams Literary Agency. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this time line of physical fitness and body ideals, Kunitz (former editor in chief, Modern Painters) takes us all the way back to the ancient Greeks, who made the gymnasium the focal point of their cities and inspired the modern-day Olympic Games. The author explains how modern exercise evolved into new approaches based on millennia-old concepts of conditioning. For most Americans, keeping and staying fit means hours at the gym (weights, spinning, treadmills), all in an effort to tone and strengthen the body. Kunitz guides readers through the influences of Eastern practices such as yoga, Renaissance art depicting the human form, the advent of new equipment and the bodybuilding culture, and modern-day fitness icons including Jane Fonda and Jack -LaLanne. The author's experiences lead him to examine the connection between the life of the body and the life of the mind, ultimately challenging the multibillion-dollar fitness industry. He concludes that the most effective tools are already at hand and successfully shows how classic methods of conditioning can still be effective today. VERDICT More of a history-based exploration than a guide to physical fitness, this book will be of interest to cultural historians and fitness enthusiasts. Appropriate for larger collections.-Janet -Davis, Darien P.L., CT © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
