Restless Reader: Evolution

Evolution by Joe Manganiello (Gallery Books, 2013), 256 pages, hardback (from $26), paperback ($15.29) or Kindle ($11.47)

Given the dozens of fitness books that cross your desk every quarter, how did you decide to write about this one by actor Joe Manganiello?

Restless Reader selects all the books she reviews through a complex process of prejudgment that weighs the credentials of the writer against the size of the type used to credit any ghost writers, the number of pages and the amount of white space, the number of chapters that appear to say the same thing over and over, the clarity of the illustrations and the likelihood that dropping the book in a bathtub would represent real loss.

In other words, the cover made you laugh?

Ummm, could be.

I mean, look at him. What do you see?

He looks angry.

He does, doesn’t he? If he wasn’t naked, bronzed, about to burst his skin, he might be portraying somebody’s dad who just noticed the minivan is missing a fender.

But this is the actor who portrays the shirtless werewolf Alcide on the HBO vampire drama True Blood, for which he delivers mighty feats of masculinity and duels and ominous glares. So more likely he is trying to look the reader dead in the eye - to drill past the optic nerve to the quivering soul of the reader - to ask, “Are you ready to be me?”

What exactly does he have to share?

A six-week, six-days-a-week workout program with suggested diet practices, including supplements such as creatine, glutamine, something that somehow releases nitric oxide, and caffeine. It’s a program he learned from Ron Matthews of Reebok CrossFit LAB of Los Angeles, who helped Manganiello get ripped for the part of his role as Alcide that isn’t handled by computer-generated imagery.

There’s a dynamic warmup of bodyweight exercises, and then each day you do six weightlifting exercises focused on different body parts. For example, Monday you work the chest and back; Tuesday come the legs and triceps; Wednesday hits the deltoids and biceps of the arms, and so forth.

As the weeks progress, you add a second daily workout (because what else in your lifeis more important than your appearance?) and the rest breaks within each workout get shorter.

So it’s just his bodybuilding routine?

Oh no. That’s not the half of it. First he tells his personal history, and it’s a classic. He was this skinny little kid, a nobody from nowhere, and there was this lost Golden Age of American fitness. Through dint of personal will, he changed his body and became camera-ready.

But then he screwed up and lost his camera-ready body. Then he wised up and regained it.

And now he’s famous.

As New York Times science writer Gina Kolata noted in a 2003 book that’s still worth reading, Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health, beginning with Bernarr Macfadden in the early 20th century and continuing through Bob Hoffman in the 1930s and Joe Weider in the ’50s, the great names of American physical culture were publishing entrepreneurs who built empires atop just such a personal myth.

They styled themselves archetypal Horatio Algers, and Manganiello appears to be doing that here.

Because he’s selling his story as much as his program, and because a father in the same tribe of self-made men, Arnold Schwarzenegger, wrote his foreword, Restless Reader thinks we can expect great things from Manganiello - a chain of fitness clubs, a line of men’s cologne,acolytes, certification programs, sequels and sequelae.

Does any of the advice in this book have application to everyday life in the real world?

Oh, sure. I especially like his emphasis on thinking of lifting as more about muscle contraction and less about the weight involved. The harder you squeeze, the less heavy the weight needs to be.

But this program is meant to make a body fit for being photographed.

How many photographs of Manganiello appear in this book?

I counted 278, including 42 on slick paper. But to be fair, there are so many because he poses for all of the exercise descriptions.

Does he look angry in all those photos?

His expressions are open to interpretation, but he doesn’t make any of it look like fun.