cover image Muscle Beach

Muscle Beach

Marla Matzer Rose, Marla Matzer Rose. L.A. Weekly Books, $16.95 (320pp) ISBN 978-0-312-24539-9

If the mania for bulging muscles wasn't born in the 1930s in Santa Monica, home of the original Muscle Beach, it was certainly incubated and seen into its precocious adolescence there. Veterans like Jack LaLanne and Joe Gold were at that point maverick athletes and stunt performers who claimed the small patch of sand as their stomping ground. In Muscle Beach: Where the Best Bodies in the World Started a Fitness Revolution, Marla Matzer Rose documents the heyday of a tiny subculture that still has enormous social ramifications at the turn of the millennium.