Despite its admirable ambition, this book’s advice lacks specificity, empirical support, and originality.
A comprehensive view of fitness and health based on a new interpretation of human evolution.
The trend in recent years has been for fitness programs to become increasingly synoptic, expanding from a surgically specific correction of a particular problem to a full lifestyle. Authors Bob Zhang and Dongxun Zhang (Intended Evolution, 2015) take this development a step further by considering health as a function of a person’s entire evolutionary profile, or “healthspan.” First, they pithily articulate their view of “intended evolution”: humans, they say, can direct their evolutionary progress by changing the way they perceive their environments. As each person is essentially a mind-body composite, they assert, postulation of goals and awareness of purpose heavily influence one’s physiological progress. The rate of change in modern society has been so dizzyingly swift that it’s outpaced our adaptation to it, but this book says that one can direct future adaptation with a highly specialized health plan that considers one’s unique biological and aspirational circumstances. In other words, it posits that the state of one’s environment induces long-term changes, essentially saved as information in intelligently functioning internal systems. Unlike the standard interpretation of evolution, the authors believe that these changes can occur in the short term. They recommend a number of health and fitness exercises, but because each individual program must ultimately be customized, they can only suggest so much. The advice sometimes doesn’t inspire confidence—it’s easy to be dubious, for example, that the shaking and twisting exercises here will lead to considerable weight loss. Zhang and Zhang don’t provide any specific empirical or clinical support for their claims, either, and they’ve already more fully developed their theory of evolution in their previous work. Indeed, the whole book has the feel of an incomplete draft. Even in broad strokes, though, the notion of agency-laden evolution is an engaging one, and the authors are to be commended for transcending the faddish obsession with one-size-fits-all dietary regimens. However, despite the originality of the context they provide, the suggestion that success is partly a function of its anticipatory visualization is hardly new, and its advocacy doesn’t require a radical reconsideration of evolution.
Despite its admirable ambition, this book’s advice lacks specificity, empirical support, and originality.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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