"In Muscles in the Movies , John Fair and David Chapman demonstrate in fascinating detail how modernity has produced its own illusory image of the muscular body through photography and movie making. They illuminate for the reader how cinema was born muscled, flexing and fully fleshed such that Hollywood could cash in on images of assertive ideal masculinity by encouraging audiences to gaze in awe upon the human machine. The medium of muscle thus became an inherent part of action movies in the service of spectacle and celebratory culture. As the authors show so convincingly, it was the clever marriage of bodily form and function and the psychic tension it created that perfected this art of illusion for moviegoers and made muscle movies both popular and lucrative."-- Patricia Vertinsky , School of Kinesiology, University of British Columbia, coauthor of The Female Tradition in Physical Education: Women First reconsidered.