Traditionally, when all the critics and bloggers are putting together their end-of-year best-whatever lists, I try to weigh in. I don't believe for second that anyone cares what I think the best books or movies might be. I just like to get into the conversation.

This year is a bit different, in that most of the movies on the top-10 lists aren't yet on DVD, and I haven't read most of the books getting accolades. I wanted to read quite a few of them, but ended up devoting my reading time to older books, or books that didn't make the critics' lists. I'll confess one reason why I avoided new ones: I realized I was reading too much about politics, and the disconnect between the facts I was learning and the way politics is covered was starting to drive me around the bend. I think this is the first time in our history we have a presidency that formulates policy based on what it wishes to be true, rather than on objective reality, and obsessing on something I couldn't change wasn't good for my mental health.

So I took a sabbatical from reading about public policy, which means I avoided The Looming Tower, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Fiasco, Hubris, State of Denial, and many others. I did read The One Percent Doctrine, which is a stunning expose of the administration's fecklessness in fighting and politicizing its various wars. And, because no one was talking about the book's revelations -- particularly the passages that showed the president knew al Qaeda had decided not to launch another attack against the U.S., and that Osama bin Laden clearly wanted Bush to be re-elected in 2004 -- I realized that knowing more of this type of information would just make me more depressed and paranoid.

And nobody needs that.

Instead, I read Brothers of Iron, the dual autobiography of Joe and Ben Weider.

If you have any interest at all in the history of bodybuilding -- which, in my view, is a lot more entertaining than the sport itself -- this is a book you should read. Then there's Joe Weider's rags-to-riches personal story, which is more moving than I'd ever imagined. Finally, there's Ben Weider's accounts of his half-century of work to make bodybuilding a legitimate sport recognized by the International Olympic Committee. On the face of it, this is as quixotic a mission as any of us could imagine. The purpose of human muscle tissue is to facilitate strength and power and speed and endurance, but the purpose of bodybuilding is to celebrate the display of that muscle tissue with no regard to its functional abilities.

That's wacky, and yet Ben Weider has devoted his entire adult life to it.

So you'd think the passages in the book in which Ben describes his travels and meetings and impassioned advocacy for bodybuilding would read like the rantings of a lunatic -- kind of like my blog, in other words. But instead you get real insight into the art of diplomacy. And I don't mean that in any sarcastic or ironic way. Ben describes tense meetings with communists and bureaucrats in the service of brutal dictators, and shows that there's always a way to present your case without making it personal or confrontational. Brothers of Iron is not by any stretch a political book, but Ben Weider is a hell of a politician.

The brothers' narration is arranged in alternating chapters, so you get a couple chapters of Joe talking about his life and his entry into the iron game, followed by a chapter of Ben talking about his quest, followed by more of Joe, and so on. The brothers' coauthor, Mike Steere, makes this work, and that's no small compliment. I was genuinely impressed by how well the stories flow. If Joe Weider had allowed this kind of editorial hand in his magazines, we'd regard him in an entirely different way today.

So let's talk about Joe's magazines.

When I started working full-time at Weider, in 1992, a few of the editors had a running joke: "Energy, Sexy, Hard." That was an actual cover line on an issue of Muscle & Fitness, which ran in '91 or '92. The line makes no sense at all -- one noun, two adjectives, no connection. Whenever one of us was stymied by an assignment or flabbergasted by a decision that had been made above our pay grade, someone would say, "Energy, sexy, hard." It was our acknowledgment that we were working in a nuthouse, and that the best strategy, most of the time, was to go with the flow. In the heart of the Weider empire, making sense wasn't required for advancement.

That's why Joe's flagship magazine was called Muscle Builder/Power for many years, before he changed it to Muscle: A New Body Image for You in 1979, and finally to Muscle & Fitness. I'm hardly an expert on the history of magazine publishing, but if there's ever been a magazine with a worse title than Muscle Builder/Power, I'd like to know about it. (Muscle: A New Body Image for You would be a contender, if it weren't just a transitional title.)

Joe Weider is his own creation, and as he says in Brothers of Iron, he became his own product, his own brand. There's an interesting passage where he tells the young and very ambitious Arnold Schwarzenegger not to waste his money buying a business to run. Arnold should be in the Arnold business, promoting himself as a unique and fungible commodity. If the passage is true, and Arnold really was considering investing his bodybuilding earnings in something that would've distracted him from his true path, then you have to think Joe gave him the best advice he'd ever received.

But it's impossible to say what in this book is true and what is Joe promoting himself. Most of the stories in the book ring true, but whenever Joe shifts from anecdote to analysis, you start getting that uncomfortable feeling that you're stuck in a room with someone truly delusional and can't find a way out.

Joe is convinced he's an absolute genius in the publishing industry, and the most important person in the history of the modern fitness movement. Ben seems convinced of this as well, so you never know when something you're reading is fact or fantasy.

I don't doubt that Joe was a very strong guy, physically, but it gets a little creepy to read in chapter after chapter how strong and muscular and handsome he was. I told some stories about Joe in this article in T-nation, and while they probably come off as mean-spirited, they really only scratch the surface. I don't believe the man has the capacity for humility or any sort of perspective about himself. If there's a camera in the room, it should be taking his picture. If there's a story to be written about fitness or bodybuilding, it should be about him.

I don't say that to deny the man his place in history; he deserves to be celebrated as a guy who believed in himself and believed in the importance of exercise as a ticket to lifelong health and vitality. It's fine that he promotes himself as an example of practicing what he preached.

But, as I said, it sometimes gets a little creepy.

The lack of perspective about himself may have been the trait that allowed him to start off as an impoverished, uneducated kid in Montreal and end up as a mentor and close friend of the governor of California. But it makes me wonder what he could've achieved if he hadn't been so hell-bent on self-promotion. Would someone have been brave enough to him that "Energy, Sexy, Hard" was a really stupid cover line? Or that he should stop boasting about himself long enough for someone else to sing his praises?

Joe's absolute refusal to be objectively assessed or second-guessed shows up in some unintentionally funny passages in Brothers of Iron. In various chapters, he compares himself to Einstein (for codifying bodybuilding methodology), to Alexander the Great (for standing up to Bob Hoffman, a more established rival), to Hernando Cortez (for standing up to his mother, who thought he was nuts for trying to be a magazine publisher), and to Lorenzo di Medici, for bringing "prosperity, stability, and safety from tyrants who wanted to oppress bodybuilders."

I shit you not.

He also prides himself on being self-educated, but then compares himself and Arnold to "Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn on their raft, looking up at the stars and drifting into the future." You'd think someone would've pointed out that it was the escaped slave Jim on the raft, not Tom Sawyer. In another passage he mentions Hercules fighting the Hydra, "a horrible monster that ... had a hundred heads." Any sixth-grader with a yen for Greek mythology could have told him the Hydra had nine heads, one of which was immortal. But when you see yourself as the embodiment of all the world's greatest thinkers and conquerors and champions of the downtrodden, you don't listen to sixth graders who might save you from making utterly foolish assertions.

That, I fear, is going to be Joe's legacy -- he'll be remembered as a guy whose single-minded belief in himself was both his greatest virtue and worst shortcoming. In a way, he reminds me of the current president, a genius at politics but a disastrous leader who will go to his grave believing that he deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill.

On the bright side, at least the president has so far resisted comparing himself to Einstein or Huck Finn. If he did ... well, let's just say I'd start drinking early and often.

Tags: entertainment