Having had a fleeting experience with the book’s production, I can highly recommend Mr. America, Mark Adams’ just-released biography of Bernarr Macfadden, an American who lived from 1868 to 1955 and had enough idiosyncrasies to fill an encyclopedia. (Adams’ book is a more manageable 304 pages.)

Macfadden was a fitness nut (emphasis on the nut) who did more than anyone else to shape the exercise- and diet-obsessed branch of our culture. The book’s handsome web site features an interview with Adams, including this:

Q: You tried out some of Macfadden’s regimens on yourself. Did they work?

A: Some of them worked fantastically well. His raw-food diet essentially changed my body’s chemistry. My skin cleared up, my hair became silkier and I even smelled better. You sort of get used to your own scent over the years, so when it changes suddenly it’s a little disconcerting. Even my dog was confused.

The Washington Post has already called the book “hilarious” and “delightful,” but the review wasn’t limited to adjectives. I liked this part:

[Macfadden is] a figure so intensely American that the title of Mark Adams’s hilarious biography seems almost like underkill. If Macfadden hadn’t existed, we would have had to invent him, yes . . . but who could have? A guy who ate sand by the handfuls, plugged his fedora with holes to let his brain breathe and insisted on naming his third daughter “Brawnda” (emphasis on the “brawn”)? A guy who created a “Peniscope” to “reinvigorate the hidden vitality centers of tired executives,” who believed so profoundly in colonic irrigations that he called himself “B.M.,” who filed papers to start his own religion and celebrated his 84th birthday by parachuting into the Seine? Theodore Dreiser throws up his hands. Sinclair Lewis runs screaming from the scene.