Swole

April 1, 2024
Brodeur, a classical music critic for the Washington Post, debuts with a winsome and insightful blend of cultural history and memoir that tracks the idealized beefcake body from ancient Greece to today and chronicles his own queer coming-of-age transformation from “wispy, waify string bean of a boy” to “meathead.” The historical segments shed particular light on contemporary fitness culture’s development, explaining how it first emerged in early 19th-century Germany in deep entanglement with nationalist principles, and was brought to the U.S. by failed 1848 revolutionaries. Throughout, Brodeur maintains a sharp focus on the way Western culture’s perceived mind-body divide has shaped ideas about masculinity (during what he calls American men’s “first identity crisis” in the mid-19th century, the Atlantic Monthly lamented that “a race of shopkeepers, brokers and lawyers could live without bodies”). This ideological undercurrent also surfaces in the autobiographical sections. Of his teenage years, Brodeur writes: “I longed to forget I even had a body. I started thinking of myself as my thoughts.” He builds up to an intriguing hypothesis concerning today’s extremist online culture of men seeking to reclaim a lost masculinity characterized by physical fitness and misogyny. Its catalyst, according to Brodeur, was the internet itself, which, by chipping away at real-life interaction, has set in motion another identity crisis over the separation between mind and body. Punchy, entertaining, and perceptive, this delivers.

April 15, 2024
A self-described "meathead" writes compellingly about the world of bodybuilding. "I am trying to get Big, and doing it very much on purpose. No, I am not sure why. Yes, you can feel my arm." So writes Brodeur, who, at a glance, might seem an unlikely candidate for bodybuilding: He is, after all, the classical music critic for the Washington Post. But there's more to bodybuilding than meets the eye. It's the locus of a gay subculture, a highly visible means of self-expression, and a way of both adopting and subverting he-man ideals--and besides, "I also really love how my ass looks." Brodeur takes readers on a wide-ranging tour of lifting and the cultural factors that propel "the long physical and psychological road of consciously building one's body." One is the world of childhood, in which many boys played with musclemen dolls and unconsciously absorbed their physical ideals; another was the openness of the bodybuilding culture to those who were once the "klutzes who sucked very conspicuously at team sports and grew up to opt for the weight room over the battlefield or the ball field." Brodeur is consistently funny, but he is also a cleareyed student of the culture with a trove of trivia to fall back on: Who knew that Lou Ferrigno's Incredible Hulk body double was a Black bodybuilder (no matter, since the filmmakers decided "green is green") or that some current bodybuilding ideals can be traced to Dutch Renaissance art? Allowing that there are all sorts of prejudices against it, Brodeur, in the end, delivers a host of good reasons for picking up the weights and putting those muscles to work. A memoir, history, and critical essay in one, sure to captivate anyone who's ever pumped--or dreamed of pumping--iron.

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