The Body Shop is written by a man, Paul Solotaroff, and the subject matter of the book is definitely guy-oriented, since the book is basically Paul’s memoir about his summer on steroids, and how getting immersed in the world of steroids wound up affecting him for the rest of his life (you can find a more detailed description in my upcoming post. I love memoir-type books, especially those that are written casually and with plenty of emotion and feelings, as opposed to dry memoirs that are more like boring documentaries.
The Body Shop was a very good read. Paul takes you through that entire summer and the ensuing fall-out in his personal life, including how he looked and felt about himself prior to using steroids and working out religiously, how he got introduced to steroids, and what it was like to be on them. There’s good and bad, funny and sad. The story is very detailed, though at the end it does suddenly skip forward to decades later, with the book closing on Paul speaking to his dying father about what happened during that summer while he was in college.
Would I recommend this book for anyone to read? Absolutely!
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