A good choice for those seeking a macro view of the history of movement. For what to do about it, hire a trainer.
An accomplished intellectual explains our need to be regularly physical.
While there are plenty of generalities that apply to exercise—it’s good for us, it may help prevent disease, it’s best done regularly—most of the important elements are personal and variable. Near the beginning of his latest, Harvard paleoanthropologist Lieberman states, “this is not a self-help book.” Indeed, the narrative is more of a thoughtfully organized natural history than a straightforward how-to guide. In appealing, accessible language, the author tells interesting stories and only seldom slips into the weeds—e.g., overly long discussions of the daily lives of hunter-gatherers. He also addresses relevant topics that regularly generate misinformation: “Is sitting the new smoking? “Is it bad to slouch? Do you need eight hours of sleep?” As the author notes, many Americans don’t get enough exercise, so some may wonder how many will desire a pure history of something they don’t do and don’t like. Nonetheless, Lieberman adds useful context regarding the why of exercise—we didn’t evolve to spend time on treadmills, yet exercise seems essential in a post-industrial age—and readers will want to know what to do with this compelling information. The author suggests some answers, such as in a section on how exercise might be applied to combat certain common ailments. An example: “This one is easy: cardio is better than weights for obesity.” It wouldn’t be hard to find personal trainers who quibble with that statement. After all, is the goal sustained weight loss or the most weight loss in a specific period of time? How old/healthy/overfed/active is the person? While readers may not be convinced by such statements as “make exercise necessary and fun,” the author successfully makes use of “evolutionary and anthropological perspectives to explore and rethink dozens of myths about physical inactivity, activity, and exercise.”
A good choice for those seeking a macro view of the history of movement. For what to do about it, hire a trainer.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-524-74698-8
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.
A warts-and-all portrait of the famed techno-entrepreneur—and the warts are nearly beyond counting.
To call Elon Musk (b. 1971) “mercurial” is to undervalue the term; to call him a genius is incorrect. Instead, Musk has a gift for leveraging the genius of others in order to make things work. When they don’t, writes eminent biographer Isaacson, it’s because the notoriously headstrong Musk is so sure of himself that he charges ahead against the advice of others: “He does not like to share power.” In this sharp-edged biography, the author likens Musk to an earlier biographical subject, Steve Jobs. Given Musk’s recent political turn, born of the me-first libertarianism of the very rich, however, Henry Ford also comes to mind. What emerges clearly is that Musk, who may or may not have Asperger’s syndrome (“Empathy did not come naturally”), has nurtured several obsessions for years, apart from a passion for the letter X as both a brand and personal name. He firmly believes that “all requirements should be treated as recommendations”; that it is his destiny to make humankind a multi-planetary civilization through innovations in space travel; that government is generally an impediment and that “the thought police are gaining power”; and that “a maniacal sense of urgency” should guide his businesses. That need for speed has led to undeniable successes in beating schedules and competitors, but it has also wrought disaster: One of the most telling anecdotes in the book concerns Musk’s “demon mode” order to relocate thousands of Twitter servers from Sacramento to Portland at breakneck speed, which trashed big parts of the system for months. To judge by Isaacson’s account, that may have been by design, for Musk’s idea of creative destruction seems to mean mostly chaos.
Alternately admiring and critical, unvarnished, and a closely detailed account of a troubled innovator.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2023
ISBN: 9781982181284
Page Count: 688
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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