Making the American Body: The Remarkable Saga of the Men and Women Whose Feats, Feuds, and Passions Shaped Fitness History

This was a very interesting overview of fitness sports in the US. I would have liked it to go into more detail with some of the history, but on the whole, it was fairly thorough and gave a good timeline of fitness sports in the US. I have the Kindle edition and trying to find the few pictures in the book of some of the older fitness personalities such as Jack Lalane, to show my wife, was pretty much impossible. If they were set out in a separate section or indexed, it would have helped.

Fabulous history of the movement/exercise evolution in the United States. Very comprehensive and interesting read!

If you are a P.E. teacher you must read this book.Your students deserve to learn how fitness was born and popularized in this country. Athletes of all sports and fitness enthusiasts will love it.The book is overflowing with fascinating facts and stories about the many personalities that have made up the fitness industry in the U.S. Weightlifting, gyms, media, Presidential Fitness Awards, Olympics, aerobics and Pilates and all the key players are covered in this engaging book.I loved learning that people have been worrying about how fat and out of shape Americans are since the 1950s. Despite the work of these pioneers, the problem has only gotten worse!The author is a great writer and this work of nonfiction that reads as easily as a novel. It is organized by decades from the 1900s to the 1990s.

Funny, fast-moving history of the larger-than-life characters who created the fitness industry. Author Black clearly did a great deal of research for this book and found an abundance of revealing quotations and anecdotes. Especially fascinating to this baby boomer were the behind-the-scenes stories of movements that I'd lived through but didn't know the history of. I was glad to see a skeptical history of Joseph Pilates, creator of the useless exercise method.Most enjoyable was the part about Arthur Jones, the brilliant and eccentric inventor of Nautilus machines whose motto was "Younger women, faster airplanes, bigger crocodiles."One quibble: The copyediting left something to be desired. There is "Bausch and Laumb" (Bausch and Lomb), "Jack London's short story 'A Piece of Streak'" ("A Piece of Steak"), and "actress Sally Fields" (Sally Field). Where was the copy editor at the University of Nebraska Press?

Very disappointed. Writing was fair and disjointed.