Mr. America: How Muscular Millionaire Bernarr Macfadden Transformed the Nation Through Sex, Salad, and the Ultimate Starvation Diet Review

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(More customer reviews)As the creator of the [...] web site and an avid collector of Macfadden memorabilia, I was eager to read Mr. America, a biography of Bernarr Macfadden.
Mr. America tells the rags-to-riches story of an incredibly interesting and multi-faceted individual, Bernarr Macfadden, a true self-made man and self-promoter (who even coined his own name). Macfadden was a larger-than life personality who, starting out as a poor and sickly orphan, became an icon for health and strength as well as a multi-millionaire entrepreneur. He had a monumental influence on shaping several industries, from bodybuilding to health foods and exercise to publishing. He was internationally famous during the first half of the twentieth century, but, incredibly, is virtually unknown today.
Mr. America is a comprehensive and well-researched biography, but, more than that, it captures the amazement one is sure to experience when "discovering" Macfadden for the first time. It is exciting to read about such Macfadden "firsts" as promoting the first public bodybuilding contests in America, campaigning against prudery and corsets, battling with censors and the medical profession, advocating natural foods and exercise, publishing the longest-running health magazine in history (nearly 60 years), and launching a whole genre of pulp magazines (True Story, etc.) from which he created a multi-million dollar media empire.
One thing that makes this biography especially enjoyable is how Mr. Adams has tied parts of Macfadden's amazing story to the people and things that the reader is familiar with (such as Jack LaLanne and Nike shoes). Although this book is meticulously researched, it does not read like a stuffy history textbook. Instead, the author tells this amazing story in a conversational style that makes his book especially fun to read.

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