Review by Booklist Review
Skeletal muscle has many important functions, but most essentially, it moves us. In this wide-ranging tribute to muscle building, Gross touts the safety and usefulness of progressive resistance training (weightlifting) from youth through advanced old age. Some benefits of strength training include improved fitness, better bone density, enhanced mood, and a decreased risk of chronic diseases. A strong suit of the book is its consideration of the connotations, metaphors, and paradoxes of "muscle." Gross explores shifting views of strength and muscle in history, medicine, culture, and philosophy. Strongmen, classic sculpture, scientific findings, and sports, and a seminal 1940s physician, Dr. Thomas DeLorme, are discussed. Gross also profiles a professor of classics who lifts weights recreationally, a specialist in geriatric medicine who investigates resistance exercise therapy in the elderly, and a record-breaking female powerlifter. Gross movingly writes, "Your ability to stand and go where you want to go--your independence, autonomy, and agency; your effectiveness in the world--will depend on muscle, to the last day of your life." A convincing argument for appreciating and maintaining your muscles and health.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist Gross (Starstruck) presents a vigorous examination of the history and science of strength training. Charting the evolution of muscle-building exercise, Gross discusses how such ancient physicians as Galen and Seneca warned that working out too much risked under-developing the mind through neglect, how Victorian strongwomen were celebrated for their beauty despite prevailing beliefs that women should be "fragile and submissive," and how Soviet researchers revolutionized powerlifting by developing "periodization" (a training method that organizes workouts into cycles of increasing intensity) in the 1950s. Gross also profiles powerlifter Charles Stocking, detailing how fellow lifters taught him proper form to minimize his risk of injury, how a painful mistake shortly before a competition led him to adopt periodization, and how continued training keeps him feeling healthy into his 40s. "Even into oldest age... every person has some power to change how time changes the body," Gross contends, describing how geriatrician Maria Fiatarone Singh's research provided high-intensity strength training to the elderly residents of a Boston rehabilitation center and found that the training was safe and effective at building muscle even for nonagenarians. Buoyed by enlightening history and a cerebral bent (Gross emphasizes throughout that muscle's capacity to "modulate our power to act upon the world" enables "independence, autonomy, and agency"), this delivers. Photos. Agent: Todd Shuster, Aevitas Creative Management. (Mar.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
There's a good reason to stay strong, and, this book shows, it's not just to battle the bullies of the world. It's a pleasing surprise that much ofVanity Fair contributor Gross' book on muscles should center so closely on ancient Greek and Roman ideas of strength. In part that stems from the fact that one of his principal informants is "probably the only classics professor who is also a record-setting powerlifter" and, on top of that, probably the only classics professor who is also a professor of kinesiology. Charles Stocking benefited from a kind of boot camp run by an older brother, also a classicist, who interested him in the language Homer and other ancient authors use to describe strength, and not always in expected ways; as Gross writes ofThe Iliad, "When muscle appears on this poem's bloody battlefield, the material connotes little more than vulnerability--in the gore of dying bodies' open wounds." Amid the learned discussions of Greek athletics, in which bodily prowess was put to work in contests that paid homage to the gods, Gross also turns to somewhat more familiar territory: His notes, for example, on how humans lose muscle mass and strength as they age ought to inspire readers of a certain age to get off the couch and hit the barbells: "Conventional wisdom about muscle and aging had been wrong. With effort, older people could make the same relative gains of strength and muscle as younger people could make." Interlocutors such as Arnold Schwarzenegger enter the conversation, while Gross surveys all the many reasons that attending to muscles is in our best interests, not least because, according to a study he cites, lifting weights can reduce psychological depression--and who isn't just a little depressed these days? An engagingly learned look at the human body. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
