Paul SolotaroffReseñas

Solotaroff is self-deprecating and wry as he documents his nightmare journey into steroid use in the 70s. He also abused drugs and alcohol and dancing (seriously). The stories are hair-raising and all too human, the writing is very good though it does descend into the purple on occasion. Some of the passages about how the author reacted to the pure animal joy of weightlifting certainly resonated with me. The parts that were more alien, about being a genetically non-muscular adolescent male, were quite interesting. Very readable.

"The Body Shop" is heartbreaking, hilarious, and raunchy--with bad '70s hair, clothes, and music (if you're of the era prepare to be earwormed by the "Chicken Delight" jingle and "Disco Inferno")...in a phrase, it's epically good. Paul Solotaroff is a scrawny Jewish kid who blossoms after he discovers weightlifting, 'roids, and sex but ultimately loses himself in the maelstrom of late '70s debauchery and foolishness. His mentor, Angel, is one of the most brilliantly drawn characters ever; as is often the case, fiction could never conceive of someone as poisonously attractive as Angel. He's magnetic, dangerous, hysterically funny and, in the end, very, very sad.

Solotaroff is a brilliant writer; he's able to be both blisteringly profane (his descriptions of his 'roid-inflamed member will stay with you a long time) and lyrical. I hesitate to use the hackneyed term "redemptive", but in the end that's exactly what this book is. I especially appreciated the trip through the past. Being the same age as Solotaroff, I felt like I was back in my bell bottoms listening to Jethro Tull.

In the meantime, I'm off to the Universal gym to pump some iron.

This review first appeared on my blog: http://jewelknits.blogspot.com/2010/09/body-shop-by-paul-solotaroff-book.html

I have a rather testy relationship with memoirs. Most I find to be either a flagrant lapse into "other-blame" (my mom was horrible to me; thereby I did coke) or a dry recounting of events that don't feel as though they actually happened to ANYone. Other times, the "self-promotion" factor becomes too much for me - I feel that if you're really THAT great, you don't have to toot your own horn - others will do it for you.

So why read a memoir about a weight-lifting, steroid-shooting hulk of a guy that I have nothing in common with? I read other good reviews ... I'm still trying to get over my love/hate relationship with memoirs, and I figured, "why not?"

For the first few pages, I asked myself, "why", as I plunged right into the middle of a scene with no prelude and a dizzying march of events. Then I got past that first section.

This is an extremely well-written account of a dorky, bookish Jewish guy from Prospect Park stumbling into a college just to do "something", seeing an Apollo of a dorm-mate who offered to show him how to bench, and finding out that simply pumping iron wasn't enough to get him the kind of body that would get the girls.

Another lifter introduces him to 'roids, and the bulk starts to pile on. His taste in steroid cocktails is further refined when he meets Angel, a caramel god who carries a boatload of cash and has girls falling all over themselves to get to him.

We are participants in a spiral and can easily see how slippery a slope it becomes once you allow yourself to be caught up in the false glam and admiration that money and muscles get you. Especially when your father has been both physically and seemingly emotionally absent, and you have a mother that could have used the benefit of today's illuminating grasp of the nature of bipolar disorder.

I've never been a hormonally-addled, skinny Jewish kid who girls never take a second look at, but the writing in this book makes even ME see how that kid felt.

Is it a guy book? Definitely, BUT it also gives us women insight into the male psyche that we might be lacking. After reading this, we might just understand what happened with that 'first, crazy love' that went off the rails. If you are a parent, it might help you understand the kind of thinking that makes your young adult veer off the rails, no matter how well-raised.

Would I recommend it? Yes; I definitely would.

QUOTES:

As a kid long used to the quirks of his own company, I never fully grasped how the experience of reading Dickens was enhanced by playing "Free Bird" at jet-plane volume, or how a nap before dinner was much facilitated by the clangor of Molly Hatchet. As near as I could figure, the purpose of such behavior was to prevent anyone else from doing his work, such that all grades would suffer and flatten the curve, raising a C-minus paper to a C plus.

It's hard when you've had so little of it in life, to place much stock in joy: the giving, and getting, of route-going pleasure and a sudden, home sense of connection. But you wake up one morning with a woman lying next to you who, even in the dishevelment of sleep and sweat, causes your heart to hump, and you lay back down and, for the first time ever, think those tall words I'm happy.

...cocaine plus steroids equals crazy. Not goofy ha-ha-crazy or Syd-Barett-on-acid crazy, but crazy as in fight four cops barehanded - a black-diamond run to deep dementia.½

True story of six New Yorkers who sign up to a group therapy course to change their lives.

"It's painful to listen to yourself, at least in the beginning, but the alternative is endless suffering," says Dr. Lathon (a pseudonym), the therapist of this group. This book is not a self-help text, says author Paul Solotaroff, but a "work of narrative journalism" documenting six people living through a year of group therapy. The people and their problems are real, but their identities are disguised to protect their anonymity. Solotaroff, who was a participant in an earlier group with Lathon, is a creative, accomplished writer who brings the people to life visually as well as orally. Lathon "looked like a man with his own Learjet, or the maitre d' at a restaurant you couldn't afford." You get to know Lathon's humor, insights, and commentary on his patients. His number-one rule is hard work; next is fearless honesty. The six group members are intriguing, witty, dramatic, and in pain--like characters in an Edward Albee play. Their troubles run the gamut: substance abuse, infidelity, embezzlement, emotional abuse, loneliness, unfinished business with parents. If you've been wondering how group therapy works and what you might learn about yourself, you'll get plenty of insights. If you just like to eavesdrop on other people baring their souls of troubled, intimate details, you'll get that here, too. --Joan Price

From Publishers Weekly
In this perceptive account of how a group of strangers came together over the course of a year to regain a sense of equilibrium in their fast-track lives, journalist Solotaroff provides an inside look at the "talking cure." The occasionally combustible cast of six patients, afflicted with a laundry list of private demons, childhood traumas, addictions and phobias, duel with one another and with their volatile group leader, psychopharmacologist Charles Lathon.

This unique book takes readers behind the closed doors of a group therapy session--introducing them to six patients and the therapist who guides them through their emotional minefields. Group reads like a novel--and "might make the most well-adjusted among us want to pull up a chair and start evolving" (Time Out New York).

This "inside look at the 'talking cure'...will keep readers riveted up to the last page." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A fabulous story...absolutely riveting." --Booklist (starred)

"Solotaroff manages to make us care about these people--and root for their recovery." --Elle

"Group is a great book...the writing and personal drama are so compelling that reading Group is like racing through the pages of a mystery." --Denver Rocky Mountain