A vigorously written must-read for exercise enthusiasts primed for the ultimate fitness challenge.
Former New York Times columnist and Rolling Stone rock critic Herz (Joystick Nation: How Videogames Ate Our Quarters, Won Our Hearts, and Rewired Our Minds, 1997, etc.) shares her enthusiasm for the CrossFit strength and conditioning movement.
The CrossFit fitness craze is based on the model of a maximum-output physical regimen of “diabolically intense” timed movements. Herz explores this exhilarating, addictive activity with equal potency, focusing on the health phenomenon’s diverse aspects, including its genesis in a Santa Cruz, California, gym and the ideals adopted by exercise guru and founder Greg Glassman. After delving into the hormonal, anaerobic and metabolic effects CrossFit can have on the human body, the author energetically presents a vast array of profiles and interviews with exercise, sports, law enforcement and military specialists—all enamored by CrossFit’s exhaustive, unisex physical demands and rational core methodology. Herz adds a dramatic flair to her prose, igniting excitement and an uptick in interest even when discussing the female names for CrossFit’s ritualistic workouts of the day or its buzzword-trendy, disciplined philosophy (“half chivalric code and half Bushido”). The author champions the yearly installations of the global, hypercompetitive CrossFit Games with brio, spotlighting the highs and lows of the competitions’ most elite challengers. Oddly, however, Herz embeds critical information on the inherent risks associated with such high-intensity physical training deep into a chapter devoted to a firefighter who successfully adopted the CrossFit approach. At times, the author’s exuberance for this trendsetting industry reads like boilerplate infomercial copy (“CrossFit HQ protects a culture that embraces competitive fitness. It’s a cult of excellence….It’s a strategy for resilience”), but as the underdog of the exercise world, CrossFit training (at least to the author) remains a “triumph of the generalist.”
A vigorously written must-read for exercise enthusiasts primed for the ultimate fitness challenge.Pub Date: June 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-34887-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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