Muscletown USA: Bob Hoffman and the Manly Culture of York Barbell
Author: John D Fair
From the 1930s to the 1980s, the capital of weightlifting in America was York, Pennsylvania, the home of the York Barbell Company. Bob Hoffman, the founder of York Barbell, propagated an ideology of success for Americans seeking physical improvement. Often called the "Father of World Weightlifting," Hoffman was a pioneer in marketing barbells and health foods. He popularized weight training and inaugurated a golden age of American weightlifting. Muscletown USA--part biography, part business history, and part sports history--chronicles how Hoffman made York the mecca of manly culture for millions of followers worldwide.Hoffman created his so-called muscle empire out of an oil-burner business that he started in the early 1920s. Within a decade, his passion for sport exceeded his need to produce oil burners and by the outset of the Depression he began manufacturing barbells at the factory. He soon discovered a willing public of aspiring weightlifters like himself who would buy not only barbells but also health and fitness products. Hoffman soon recruited a remarkable group of athletes, whom he tagged his "York Gang." He gave these men jobs in the factory, where they trained for national and international meets. Gradually, Hoffman emerged as one of the most prominent muscle peddlers in America, using his fame and fortune to promote competitive weightlifting, bodybuilding, and powerlifting. Muscletown USA reveals other innovations in which Hoffman played a major role, including weight training for athletes, health foods, bottled spring water, isometrics, and women's weightlifting. Even anabolic steroids, first used by weightlifters in the early 1960s, were a direct outgrowth of thefitness culture spawned by Hoffman.Meticulously researched and engagingly written, Fair's book will appeal to a wide range of readers, including anyone fascinated by American sports history and the iron game.
John D. Fair is professor of history and chair of the Department of History and Geography at Georgia College & State University in Milledgville, Georgia. He is the author of two books on modern British history. He has competed in more than fifty Olympic and powerlifting meets, coached several teams, taught weight-training classes, staged meets, been a national referee, served on the national weightlifting committee, and even judged a Mr. America contest.
Booknews
A cultural history of the golden age of weightlifting, a phenomenon largely created by Bob Hoffman (1897-1985), whose promotion of a remarkable group of weightlifters known as the York gang sparked an American fascination with the sport that lasted well into the 1960s. The author focuses on the gender constructs surrounding weightlifting during that era and how the sport contributed to traditional constructs of masculinity. Excellent b&w illustrations of the era's finest athletes, including John Grimek's classic Grecian pillar pose<- ->"the greatest muscle picture ever shown." Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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Mouse Models of Human Blood Cancers: Basic Research and Pre-Clinical Applications
Author: Shaoguang Li
In this book, Dr. Li and his author team plan to emphasize why mouse models are useful in vivo systems for understanding disease mechanisms and developing therapeutic strategies in blood cancers. The authors do not intend to cover all types of blood cancers; instead, they will focus on some major ones such as leukemias and lymphomas. However, the authors will try to cover as much as they can the cancer types and point out that many blood cancers need to be studied in mouse disease models although they are still not available at present. A major focus in the book will be to show what we can or cannot learn from mouse disease models and to also show the critical contributions of mouse models in therapeutic drug development.
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