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Strong as Sandow

I appreciate the idea of a picture-book biography of someone students might not know about, and one that encourages exercise and healthy eating, but I’ve got several problems with this book. Right off the bat, it begins by telling us that he was a bit of a sickly child, skinny and feeble and frail, and then we turn the page and the next sentence says, “But Friedrich survived.” That seemed like a big jump, as nothing in being described as skinny and frail had seemed life-threatening. My main objection is hidden in the author’s note at the very back of the book, rarely read by children, when the author admits that the subject of his book was known for self-promotion, and there is much doubt over the authenticity of events he presented in the main body of the text as fact.