Houdini - real name Ehrich Weiss, son of an immigrant rabbi - belongs in the same company with Sandow not just because he was a showman. Having thus established his bona fides as a gentleman, he stripped and got down to business, wowing audiences with what Kasson describes as "his overall muscular strength, control, and definition before the names of the major muscle groups were common parlance, Sandow seemed a walking anatomic chart." He was allowed this departure from Victorian propriety because he made a reassuring first impression, coming onstage in white tie and tails. He was not just an admirable specimen but an audaciously visible one - he performed almost in the nude. Next to our ripped Antonios and Markys, Sandow might rate merely an A-minus, but 100 years ago he had few peers. Sandow, a German-born acrobat and weightlifter who performed in Europe and then the United States, was a precursor to the eroticized male image flaunted today on movie and TV screens, on billboards and in magazine clothing ads. Kasson creates a triad consisting of the great illusionist, the fictional apeman, and strongman Eugene Sandow, all of whom flourished at the same time (roughly the first third of the 20th century) and whose personas helped effect a change in the way people look at the male body. In Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man, history professor John F. What they have in common, aside from a light touch, is their consideration of Harry Houdini, the American master of illusion and escape, not as a magician whose tricks and feats are to be explained, nor as a life to be depicted, but as a jumping-off point for reflection. Houdini's Box is something of a hybrid of psychology and philosophy. Houdini, Tarzan, and the Perfect Man might be classified as gender studies. These are quirky little books: nonfictional, nonnarrative (although stories get told in both), provocative, smoothly written. By Reviewed Dennis Drabelle July 29, 2001
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