Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Testosterone has inspired dreams--of restored youth, recharged sexual appetites, faster running, quicker thinking, bigger muscles--since it was first synthesized in 1935. This provocative book investigates the complex, bizarre, and sometimes outrageous history of synthetic testosterone and other male hormone therapies. Exploring many little-known social arenas--both inside and outside the medical world--in which these substances are becoming increasingly available and accepted, Testosterone Dreams examines the implications and dangers of their use in professional sports, in the workplace, in our sex lives, and beyond.



Testosterone Dreams tells the story of testosterone's growing and sometimes concealed influence in our culture over the past 70 years. It explores such controversial topics as the invention and marketing of the male menopause, the disturbing history of hormonal and other medical treatments aimed at boosting or suppressing women's sexuality, and hormone doping in sporting events such as the Tour de France and the Olympics, and in Major League Baseball. It brings to light the hidden use of hormone doping by policemen, soldiers, and other workers in a variety of jobs. It also discusses the burgeoning steroid use in the gay community and its relation to AIDS, and takes a hard look at the pharmaceutical industry's promotional campaigns to create new markets for testosterone products.



Testosterone Dreams is the first book to bring together the whole story of testosterone and to consider its social and ethical implications: Where does therapy end and performance enhancement begin? How are changing medical technologies affecting how we think about our identities as men and women and the elusive goal of "well-being"? This book will be essential reading as we move inexorably toward the wide-open, libertarian pharmacology that is now making these drug regimes available to a wider and wider clientele.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Independent scholar Hoberman offers a disturbing, well documented investigative history of the conflicting and changing social and ethical policy considerations of hormone doping and/or antiaging sex therapy, whether by athletes, menopausal men and/or frigid women, HIV/AIDS patients, police officers, soldiers, or bodybuilders. The author provides enlightening background on Olympics drug testing politics; the surprising attitudes of coaches, sports physicians, and loyal fans; widespread public indifference to doping; and fierce national pride in the success of winning athletes. He highlights the former East Germany and export trade of East German coaches, cycling's Tour de France, Major League Baseball and anabolic steroids (though MLB testing policy has been strengthened since publication), and professional European soccer. Hoberman offers thoughtful consideration as to why testosterone failed as mass sex therapy. He compares and contrasts other lifestyle drugs such as Prozac, Viagra, Modafinil (Provigil; used to stay awake and alert in the military), Ritalin, estrogen replacement, DHEA, and HGH. The chapter on biomedical innovations--including fertility, cloning, stem cell research, and medical marijuana--was difficult and less interesting reading, with policy statements and legislation from the European Union, British Parliament, and other international bodies. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above, including public health policy administrators, coaches, researchers/scientists, and members of groups such as the World Anti-Doping Agency. E. R. Paterson SUNY College at Cortland

Author notes provided by Syndetics

Contributor: John Hoberman John Hoberman is the author of Darwin's Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race (1997), Mortal Engines: The Science of Performance and the Dehumanization of Sport (1992), The Olympic Crisis: Sport, Politics, and the Moral Order (1986), and Sport and Political Ideology (1984).