When I first started to hear the buzz about this book, I really was not interested.  I had a feeling I wouldn’t like Tim Ferriss — the title of his first book, which was a best seller, was “The Four Hour Work Week.”  That kind of put me off, for some odd reason.  And while I still have not read that book, I understand now that it s more about time management than actually working just four hours a week, so that changes my initial uninformed thoughts.

Anyway, back  to the buzz.  I really wasn’t interested, even though the original, working title was “Becoming Superhuman.” (Who’s not interested in *that* kind of book?)  But the publishers wanted to play off the success of his first book.  What really got me was the interview Tim did with Robb Wolf and Andy Deas on the Paleo Solution, when Tim started talking about “pre-hab” and the exercises he used to find and correct imbalances in his body.  That has long been a fascination of mine, due to what I already know are weaknesses (imbalances in strength) but weaknesses that I’ve found hard to correct.  It is my assumption that those imbalances are what causes a body to be injury prone — thus the notion of “pre hab.”

So I broke down and bought the book.  It is best to view this book as a reference book.  Read the 1st two chapters or so, and then pick out what you want.  For example, there are chapters on losing all kinds of weight.  I don’t need to do that.  There are chapters about putting all kinds of muscle on, and I also don’t need to do that.  There are chapters on going from a 5k to a 50k in twelve weeks, which were quite interesting to me, though not that useful (since I have already run that distance).  There were chapters on holding your breath for really long periods of time, which were interesting.  (Way back when — when I was a swimmer — I held my breath for 2 minutes 20 seconds.  On my 2nd try with Tim’s method, I hit 2:30!  I’m sure I could go over 3 with a few more practice attempts.)

Tim basically was a self experimenting machine for the past 10 years, and this book recounts his successes (mostly, with a few failures), with all kinds of crazy things that are much outside of conventional wisdom.  I myself find “CW” is often not right, so it was definitely an interesting read, though I’m not sure it is for everyone.  Definitely on the geeky side of things with the science behind the experiments.  (He talks about why new technology is often out of reach of the masses, much of it due to economics.  The cutting edge scientists, with new methodologies and treatments, are maybe 20 years ahead of the mainstream.  They are a limited resource, so it is those with money that get the treatments.  Typically professional athletes and hollywood stars. It takes time for these technologies to trickle down.)

I’m still playing with the pre-hab movements, of which he only gives 4 — the 4 that will have the best effect on the wides audience — and the chop and lift and single arm standing dead lift definitely show what I already know (my right side, especially the hip stabilizers, is week), but I am quite intrigued by having a real “Functional Movement Screening,” done which looks for imbalances and gives specific exercises (beyond the main 4 that Tim discusses) for each such imbalance/weakness.

Some quotes:

• Does history record any case in which the majority was right? —Robert Heinlein
• “The future is already here—it is just unevenly distributed.”
• “Fifty percent of what we know is wrong. The problem is that we do not know which 50% it is.”
• Somewhere along the line, we seem to have confused comfort with happiness. —Dean Karnazes
• Ugly, and ultimately painful, postural compensation is unavoidable when wearing shoes that elevate the heels. This simple observation somehow escaped me for 30 years, until CrossFit Chicago instructor Rudy Tapalla introduced me to Vibram Five Finger shoes, which look like gloves for your feet.
• absorb what is useful, discard what is useless, and add what is uniquely your own. — Bruce Lee
• Motion is created by the destruction of balance. —Leonardo da Vinci
• The Cartesian separation of mind and body is false. They’re reciprocal. Start with the precision of changing physical
• All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better. —Ralph Waldo Emerson

I didn’t know there was such a thing as a trailer for a book, but there is, and here’s 4hB’s trailer:

A much longer (and better!) review is located here.

This was a fantastic read, though I have to say the 1st half was much better than the 2nd.  The 2nd half, in the conclusions, was a bit of a let down for me personally.  Perhaps after such a well-reasoned and well said introduction, where everything just clicks and makes sense, the second half didn’t lead to any new and startling revelations (for me).   However, I would say it is still worth it for any Christian that wants a better understanding of the world views that existed pre-Christianity in the Western World (namely Greek and Jewish thought), how Christianity challenged and changed them, and how the Enlightenment really changed the game and led us to where we are today.

Newbigin starts with the differences between Jewish and Greek thought, especially with respect to knowledge (epistemology), what changed with Christianity, and then goes through the early centuries following Christ, tracing the changes with respect to knowledge over time.  For example, for Plato, “the ultimate realities were ideas, which are more or less fully realized in the various entities which are the objects of our experience.”  By grasping these ideas and participating in them, the soul attains its true being and salvation.  (The idea of “Good” is the apex of this hierarchy of  ideas.)  Yet, Augustine said “credo ut intelligam,” or “I believe in order to know.”  There is an element of (biblical) faith in knowledge that is lacking in Plato and is a radical departure from Greek thought.

Along came Descarte (many centuries later, of course, but we don’t need to dig too deeply into the Dark Ages, do we?), who had a goal to build indubitable knowledge on the foundation of skepticism.  He says “I think, therefore I am,” and now all knowledge starts with the individual.  (I’m skipping huge chunks of the book and moving fast, but you should be able to see that such a believe leads to post modernism, the lack of objective truth, and relativism.)

Newbigin then follows Western thought through Kant, and Kant’s arguments for God and ultimate reality based on moral and aesthetic experience.  And through the Enlightenment (The Age of Reason), where our view (humanity’s) became that Reason is the only path to reliable knowledge.  (In Deep Church, Belcher talks about Foundationalism, and that was the 1st time when I started to be able to put into words what I had felt for some time — that we sometimes need something beyond Reason — to describe things such as certainly in Faith. (But then again, there is a problem with “Faith without Doubt…”)

He goes on to argue that we are in the midst of a great collapse of confidence due to the ramifications and limitations of the models of the Enlightenment, including the collapse in European culture as well as the collapse of the confidence in the validity of the church’s worldwide missionary enterprise.  (At least he goes after his own…)

Ok, this could get really deep and long if I’m not careful.  That’s not the purpose here.   Maybe the above, along with a few more tidbits below, will be enough to entice you if you like to read this kind of book.

Random thoughts and quotes:

I liked both of these — let’s look for the good on both sides!

From the point of view of the fundamentalist, doubt is sin; from the point of view of the liberal, the capacity for doubt is a measure of intellectual integrity and honesty.

In addition to ascribing these accusations, labels, and genuine differences over doubt to both sides in this quarrel, it is also right to ascribe moral virtues to them: Liberalism at its best is marked by an open mind which is humble and ready to learn. Fundamentalism at its best is marked by a moral courage which holds fast to the truth even when it is assailed by counterclaims from without.

I don’t know why, but the subject object duality that first entered my life in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance keeps popping up in strange and unexpected places:

The second dualism, closely related to the first, is that dualism expressed by the words “objective” and “subjective.”

I feel like I am strong on gratitude, but after reading the following quote I wonder if I fall short on Trust:

But it the biblical story is true, the kind of certainty proper to a human being will be one which rests on the fidelity of God, not upon the competence of the human knower. It will be a kind of certainty which is inseparable from gratitude and trust.

I still haven’t figure out why this is the case (:-/):

Kurt Godel’s demonstration that the fundamental axioms of mathematics are not self-justifying does not seem to have weakened the influence of the idea of mathematical certainty.

And a few more:

But we are left in a world which the Chinese writer Carver Yu has summarized in the phrase “technological optimism and literary despair.” Looking at contemporary Western society from his standpoint as a Chinese philosopher and theologian, he sees not only the unstoppable dynamism of our science-based technology but also the bleak nihilism and hopelessness that is reflected in the literature, art, and drama of our society.

With hindsight, it is now easy to see how many of the self-evident truths of the Enlightenment were self-evident only to those who were the heirs of a thousand years of Christian teaching. They were not self-evident to the peoples of India or Africa.

The modern antithesis of observation and reason on the one hand versus revelation and faith on the other is only tenable on the basis of a prior decision that the whole cosmic and human story has no purpose and therefore no meaning. It is possible to make this assumption, but it is not necessary.  The question whether the cosmos and human life within it have any purpose other than the individual purposes we seek to impose on things is one that cannot be decided by observation.

 

 

Here’s a picture of my book shelf — books read in 2010…  Several of these are missing on my individual book review posts.  I am behind and really don’t know that I can catch up, so I may just have a clean up post or two.

A lot more running books and food/diet books than I ever would have guessed at the beginning of the year!  And where’s the classics?  Well I guess I did get in a couple from Chesterton.  And I might have to put the biographies/histories into a similar category.

After reading Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and enjoying it so much, I thought I should read his follow up book.  In the introduction, he explains the purpose of writing In Defense of Food:

But many readers wanted to know, after they’d spent a few hundred pages following me following the food chains that feed us, “Okay, but what should I eat? And now that you’ve been to the feedlots, the food-processing plants, the organic factory farms, and the local farms and ranches, what do you eat?

He goes on to give the answer early:

Eat food.  Mostly plants.  Not too much.

Of course, that answer needs a lot of explanation, which the rest of the book does.

Again in this book, Pollan shows he is a good writer, though I enjoyed the “adventure” aspect of The Ominvore’s Dilemma a bit more.  But this is still worth a read, and a fascinating account of the many problems with conventional wisdom, especially with respect to USDA guidelines for eating and, more specifically, with the food pyramid.  There is some repetition, of course, but that is expected.

I won’t say much more here, but will leave you with a few quotes:

Scientific reductionism is an undeniably powerful tool, but it can mislead us too, especially when applied to something as complex, on the one side, as a food and on the other a human eater. It encourages us to take a simple mechanistic view of that transaction: Put in this nutrient, get out that physiological result. Yet people differ in important ways. We all know that lucky soul who can eat prodigious quantities of fattening food without ever gaining weight. Some populations can metabolize sugars better than others. Depending on your evolutionary heritage, you may or may not be able to digest the lactose in milk. Depending on your genetic makeup, reducing the saturated fat in your diet may or may not move your cholesterol numbers. The specific ecology of your intestines helps determine how efficiently you digest what you eat, so that the same 100 calories of food may yield more or less food energy depending on the proportion of Firmicutes and Bacteroides resident in your gut. In turn, that balance of bacterial species could owe to your genes or to something in your environment. So there is nothing very machinelike about the human eater, and to think of food as simply fuel is to completely misconstrue it. It’s worth keeping in mind too that, curiously, the human digestive tract has roughly as many neurons as the spinal column. We don’t yet know exactly what they’re up to, but their existence suggests that much more is going on in digestion than simply the breakdown of foods into chemicals

Foods that lie to our senses are one of the most challenging features of the Western diet.

Nine percent of the calories in the American diet today come from a single omega-6 fatty acid: linoleic acid, most of it from soybean oil.

People eating a Western diet are prone to a complex of chronic diseases that seldom strike people eating more traditional diets. Scientists can argue all they want about the biological mechanisms behind this phenomenon, but whichever it is, the solution to the problem would appear to remain very much the same: Stop eating a Western diet.

Finally, he has this to say about Gary Taube’s Good Calories, Bad Calories, which I just happen to be reading now:

*Gary Taubes describes the developing carbohydrate hypothesis at great length in Good Calories, Bad Calories. According to the hypothesis, most of the damage to our health that has been wrongly attributed to fats for the past half century—heart disease, obesity, cancer, diabetes, and so on—can rightly be blamed on refined carbohydrates. But the healthy skepticism Taubes brought to the lipid hypothesis is nowhere in evidence when he writes about the (also unproven) carbohydrate hypothesis. Even if refined carbohydrates do represent a more serious threat to health than dietary fat, to dwell on any one nutrient to the exclusion of all others is to commit the same reductionist error that the lipophobes did. Indeed, Taubes is so single-minded in his demonization of the carbohydrate that he overlooks several other possible explanations for the deleterious effects of the Western diet, including deficiencies of omega-3s and micronutrients from plants. He also downplays the risks (to health as well as eating pleasure) of the high-protein Atkins diet that the carbohydrate hypothesis implies is a sound way to eat. As its title suggests, Good Calories, Bad Calories, valuable as it is, does not escape the confines of nutritionism.

Fortitudine vincimus – “By endurance we conquer.”

Endurance is the incredible true story of Ernest Shackleton and his crew’s amazing escape from disaster in Antartica — so incredible in some places it seems improbable that it all really occurred.  However, the journals of all the men and testimonies afterward seem to corroborate one another fully.  Every adventure racer, every endurance paddler, every navigator, etc. should read this story immediately.  🙂  It really is that good and that fascinating.  That men could survive in such conditions over such a long period of time, that they could travel the distances they traveled in the most unlikely of methods, and live to tell about it, is beyond comprehension.  And the book is so well written, it really grips you from the start and never lets you go.

For the navigators, imagine this…  When 6 of the men had to leave the rest of the crew, sailing from Elephant Island through perhaps the most treacherous ocean in the world, in a small boat not meant for that kind of thing:

They would travel perhaps a thousand miles across the stormiest ocean on the globe. The ultimate goal was an island no more than 25 miles wide at its widest point. To guide an open boat that distance, under conditions that were frightening even to contemplate, and then to strike a pinpoint on the chart was a task that would sorely tax even Worsley’s skill as a navigator.

For the orienteering population out there, imagine this… When they had to climb up and over South Georgia Island, an island with 10,000 foot peaks, glaciers, crevices, freezing cold weather, fog, etc….

“I do not know how they did it, except that they had to-three men of the heroic age of Antarctic exploration with 50 feet of rope between them-and a carpenter’s adze.”

Other quotes:

But it was inescapable. He was the Boss. There was always a barrier, an aloofness, which kept him apart. It was not a calculated thing; he was simply emotionally incapable of forgetting-even for an instant-his position and the responsibility it entailed. The others might rest, or find escape by the device of living for the moment. But for Shackleton there was little rest and no escape. The responsibility was entirely his, and a man could not be in his presence without feeling this.