Muscle

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"Do yourself a fevor, put your mon^ down, and buy this honest and very fiinny book about bodybuilding, with all its kinks and twists and warts. Mr. Fussell, I congratulate you as a writer."
—Harry Crews, author of Bod;'
"You spot them on the streets of the city and, üicreasingly, hi the malls and parks of the suburbs. Sometimes they band together. Mostly, th^f walk alone. Bodybuilders. You know the kind. They strut like no others, holdmg then- elbows wider than their shoulders, legs far apart. I know, I was one of them."
So begins Samuel W^sbn Fussell's fascinating account of the bizarre world of bodybuilding and his four obsessive years in quest of the perfect body. Muscle is a penetrating inside look—sometimes wildly funny, sometimes wrenching and poignant, always unsparingly... Tovább

Fülszöveg

r ¦ 11' I i' I' ' 1
'';i iM
J' i
11.1'
¦ Ml I I . li i:^
'.'I'l

'I 1
i nli'Vv'l;" \ I I,
!¦ 1 l' I .
lo.;
$18.95
1.1 l^l''
•'M I'i Vi' I '|I
ft 'I I I.

!•'•i iriivf' I VI! ' I

mmh
"Do yourself a fevor, put your mon^ down, and buy this honest and very fiinny book about bodybuilding, with all its kinks and twists and warts. Mr. Fussell, I congratulate you as a writer."
—Harry Crews, author of Bod;'
"You spot them on the streets of the city and, üicreasingly, hi the malls and parks of the suburbs. Sometimes they band together. Mostly, th^f walk alone. Bodybuilders. You know the kind. They strut like no others, holdmg then- elbows wider than their shoulders, legs far apart. I know, I was one of them."
So begins Samuel W^sbn Fussell's fascinating account of the bizarre world of bodybuilding and his four obsessive years in quest of the perfect body. Muscle is a penetrating inside look—sometimes wildly funny, sometimes wrenching and poignant, always unsparingly honest—at a world of desperate dreamers whose needs and fantasies are surprisingly similar to our own.
Sam Fussell grew up short, skinny and shy. Adolescence brought an outward transformation: he shot up to six feet, four inches. But inside the impressive new frame still cowered the 98-pound weakling of his boyhood; the world was as threatening as before. The armor he chose to make himself invulnerable was painfully forged of flesh and muscle in the raucous bodybuilding gyms of New York and California.
Fussell leads us into a strange subculture, part puritan, part P.T. Bamum, whose themes—the reinvention of self, growth at whatever cost, the seeking after perfection—are quintessentially American. In this odyssQf, as much spiritual as physical, the units of measurement that determine value and success are different, but the gym is not so far removed from the bedroom or the boardroom.
(continued on back flap)
(continued from front flap)
Fussell details the incredibly demanding daily regimen that gave him eighty added pounds of flesh and muscle in four years: agonizing, endlessly repetitive exercises, prodigious quantities of food and vitamins, massive steroid injections. He portrays unforgettably the colorful rogues and shaved, pumped up gym rats who became his fast friends.
The brilliant debut of an extraordinarily gifted writer, Muscle is the unique record of his attempt to armor himself, at great cost, against inner fears and outer terrors—and how, inevitably, the attempt failed.
"A cerebral exercise with barbells—terrific."
—Gay Tklese
About the Author
Samuel Wilson Fussell was born in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1958 and raised there and in Europe. He graduated in 1983 from Oxford University with an honors degree in English language and literature. He has worked as a personal trainer, a photo researcher, a Hollywood nightclub bouncer, and an assistant in a lion-and-tiger act. He is currently at work on a crime novel. Vissza