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Article: Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. (Reviews).(Book Review)
- Article from:
- Journal of Social History
- Article date:
- March 22, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Journal of Social History. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Houdini, Tarzan and the Perfect Man: The White Male Body and the Challenge of Modernity in America. By John F. Kasson (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. viii plus 256 pp.).
The historian John Kasson has over the past thirty years produced work that has always stunned and surprised. His 1978 Amusing the Million: Coney Island at the Turn of the Century masterfully delineated the development of new codes of leisure and play a hundred years ago. Kasson's 1991 work, Rudeness and Civility exposed the hypocrisies and ruses that pervaded the Victorian American urban middle classes. In every way, Kasson has been a pioneer, first of how the nuances of popular culture can shed ...