The Body Shop: Parties, Pills, and Pumping Iron — Or, My Life in the Age of Muscle Review
The Body Shop: Parties, Pills, and Pumping Iron — Or, My Life in the Age of Muscle
- ISBN13: 9780316011013
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As a scrawny college freshman in the mid-1970s, just before Arnold Schwarzenegger became a hero to boys everywhere and Pumping Iron became a cult hit, Paul Solotaroff discovered weights and steroids. In a matter of months, he grew from a dorky beanpole into a hulking behemoth, showing off his rock hard muscles first on the streets of New York City and then alongside his colorful gym-rat friends in strip clubs and in the homes of the gotham elite. It was a swinging time, when “Would you like to dance?” turned into “Your place or mine?” and the guys with the muscles had all the ladies–until their bodies, like Solotaroff”s, completely shut down.
But this isn’t the gloom-and-doom addiction one might expect–Solotaroff looks back at even his lowest points with a wicked sense of humor, and he sends up the disco era and its excess with all the kaleidoscopic detail of Boogie Nights or Saturday Night Fever.
Written with candor and sarcasm, THE BODY SHOP is a memoir with all the
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A big letdown,
This book was not at all what I expected. It really wasn’t a story about steroid use and abuse as much as it was a storytelling about a life of recreational drug use and sexual promiscuity in the decadent 1970′s. There is actually very little in this book about steroids or weightlifting, it’s mostly the author bragging about how much ass he got and wallowing in self pity because he couldn’t get his act together. What I found most curious was that there were no pictures…??? I mean how could you write a book about transforming your body into something freakish, and not have a single picture showing the before and after or even the during stages? Is that not the whole premise of this book? Also, the amount of weight he talks about lifting are not very impressive at all, as any half serious bodybuilder/weightlifter could tell you. A flat bench of 305? It’s respectable but not impressive. I didn’t start bodybuilding until my mid 30′s, and with no steroids or supplements of any kind and not even super hardcore training I was benching 335, and I know a lot of guys that can do quite a bit more than that. The writing style is pretentious and overwrought, almost like the author is trying to impress us with his vocabulary and syntax. That makes for a very unnatural flow and a difficult, skeptical read, which I’m surprised no editor has told him yet. I wouldn’t waste your time or money with this one.
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|The Body Shop,
Paul Solotaroff’s life in the seventies was no picnic and he describes what it was like weight lifting, taking steroids, hanging out in clubs and with famous people in his book, The Body Shop. With his witty sarcasm and honest writing, he lets the world in on how he went overboard and came crashing down and redeemed himself before it was too late. Too fast, too soon, but a life not lost. This memoir is a quick look into the weight-lifting world during the disco age.
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