Book Review: Born To Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen

Pasted below is Nicole's review -- I couldn't have said it any better myself:
***
I am such a book evangelist. I go into it with the same verve: “You have to read this book. It is so amazing.” And away I go, telling the person in front of me how great this book I just read is. Ugh. So annoying.

But I am at it again. I just read Born to Run. Brent and I both read it. And loved it. Brent was a runner in college, for exercise sake. I have never been too good at running, but a few years ago I had this dream about running, where it was fun again, like when I was a kid. I jumped over things and ran under logs. It made me long to run again.

About six weeks ago I started running. Slowly. One Mile. I am up to 2 miles at a go. I run until I don’t feel good, then walk. I started running because every “weight loss” book/story of success I have seen, the person has begun running.

But the book was an after thought. And what an inspiration it is. The book just makes you want to get out there and do it...barefoot. Who needs Nike? Since the advent of the running shoe in the 1970’s running injuries have steadily increased. “Shoes block pain, not impact. Pain teaches us to run comfortably. From the moment you start going barefoot, you will change the way you run.”

Did you know the foot comprises one quarter of all bones in the body and more than 200,000 nerve endings? Over 2 million years has lead to a very well designed foot for running. Putting a shoe between your foot and the ground, means those nerve endings are deadened. We don’t need shoes; we need to get off the couch. Because we are wearing shoes, our feet muscles have atrophied. The book makes the argument that our evolutionary advantage was our ability to run, unlike other species near to ours.

“Heavier people are more likely to die from at least ten different kinds of cancer.” Who knew the exact numbers?

“When cancerous tumors are removed by surgery, they are 300 percent more likely to grow back in patients with a ‘traditional Western diet’ than they are in patients who eat lots of fruits and veggies, according to a 2007 report by The Journal of the American Medical Association.” To read the actual study, click this sentence.

I have started using my Vibram FiveFingers to run, and it is so much more fun. I am really enjoying feeling the ground, standing up straighter, and breathing better. It is really amazing.

The book talks about racing, and ultra-racing, and touching moments, and high drama. It makes you want to run. So run right out and get the book!

Book Review: White Noise

Don DeLillo is one of those authors whose name I kept seeing but didn't know much about.  But I'd seen my favorite author, David Foster Wallace, compared to him so I was intrigued.  From reading the book jacket of White Noise (I found the version that was the 1985 entry on the Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) it was clear that Foster Wallace must have been influenced by this book.

The book is about a professor of "Hitler studies" at a small college.  Not much happens in the book, except in a few powerful bursts.  The main one is the "Airborne Toxic Event" which consists of a black cloud of highly toxic gas released after a railroad car accident.  The end of the book has a somewhat gruesome scene too that I won't spoil.  The book it very funny, very biting, sometimes scary, sometimes sad.  I enjoyed it immensely and it makes me wish I knew how to write like this.  How does one fill 310 pages with, for the most part, small nonevents (a trip to the grocery store, say) and nothing but internal monologue and conversations.  Moreover, how does one do that in a way that is gripping and keeps the reader interested?  Where do you learn to write a novel that says something about life as it's lived today without anything much happening to otherwise uninteresting people?  I don't know but DeLillo does.  And for a book written in 1985 its seems very prescient to me.  His observations about modern culture may have seemed exaggerated then but have only become truer since.  But the best way to convince someone to read the book (or not to) is with the following passage which I loved.  If it speaks to you then so will the book, I think.  It occurs as the protagonist professor is getting attended to at a shelter during the Airborne Toxic Event:

"That's quite an armband you've got there.  What does SIMUVAC mean?  Sounds important."

"Short for simulated evacuation.  A new state program they’re still battling over funds for."

"But this evacuation isn't simulated.  It's real."

"We know that.  But we thought we could use it as a model."

"A form of practice?  Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?"

"We took it right into the streets."

"How is it going?"  I said.

"The insertion curve isn't as smooth as we would like.  There's a probability excess.  Plus which we don't have our victims laid out where we'd want them if this was an actual simulation.  In other words we’re forced to take our victims as we find them.  We didn't get a jump on computer traffic.  Suddenly it just spilled out, three-dimensionally, all over the landscape.  You have to make allowances for the fact that everything we see tonight is real.  There's a lot of polishing we still have to do.  But that's what this exercise is all about."

Book Review: Bursts

The nonfiction book world owes Malcolm Gladwell a beer. Or maybe a car. Or even a house. You see, as far as I can tell, Gladwell was the first one to make science-y concepts accessible by telling you a story about someone or something. He won't just explain, say, some new strategy for cancer research, he'll tell you about Bob the cancer patient and Joe the cancer doctor and how no one understood what was wrong with Bob until one day he met Joe and ....

Bursts tries to make the research of author Albert-Laszlo Barabasi accessible. And Barabasi really gives us a cast of characters: the globe-trotting artist who keeps getting harrassed by Homeland Security; a guy who corresponds with Einstein about the fifth dimension; a dude with an fake ear surgically implanted on his arm (really); and best of all, half the book tells the story of the Hungarian version of Braveheart.

These stories are generally great and very intersting. The story of the Hungarian Braveheart is worth buying and reading the book alone in my opinion. The chapters of the book actually alternative between the main narrative and the historical tale of a minor nobleman who starts a rebellion of the peasants in late Medieval/early Renaissance Hungary (for Freedom!). So you could just read the history and skip the rest. In fact, I'd almost recommend it because the rest of the book is a bit of muddle.

The book is called "Bursts" and it turns out that scientists, including Barabasi, have discovered a bursty pattern in nature, including human nature. For example, animals don't search for food using a truly random pattern. If they did, you see the same animal is all kinds of different places on any given day. Instead, animals stay in a particular area for a while, hunting someplace while the hunting is good. Once the hunting turns bad, then there's a 'burst' where they jump to a new hunting ground. Similarly, humans tend do to things like respond to emails in bursts during the day. We don't respond as every email comes in, but we prioritize. Some emails will get an immediate response. Some will wait hours, some days, some even weeks (or longer for me).

Great. So we burst. Animals burst. So what? Well, Barabasi is also trying to tell us that we're very predictable. If he knows your daily pattern he can tell you where you're likely to be on any given day at any given time. For a huge percentage of us 80% of our time is spent at home or at work. And we're very regular about it. We might show up in Australia once in a while, but that, too, happens in bursts. We don't wake up on random mornings and say "hey, why don't play hooky from work and fly to Paris instead!" (or if we do, we don't actually follow through).

Barabasi thinks that someday we'll find out that our future is totally predictable because he can predict (using our cellphone location records) where we spend most of our day. Or at least, the future might be predictable. Or it might not. Hmmm. Did I mention the part about the Hungarian Braveheart? I don't want to give anything away, but if you think Mel Gibson got tortured good at the end of that movie, wait until you find out how they did it in Hungary! Worth the price of admission alone.