From age 5, thanks to her super fit, martial arts expert father, Bonnie Tsui knew what it was to be strong. “As far back as memory serves, my brother and I were drafted to join our father in training sessions,” she recalls in On Muscle: The Stuff That Moves Us and Why It Matters. “Exercise was fun in our house.”
When Tsui was 8, those sessions became tinged with sorrow when her grandfather died, and her father became permanently “preoccupied with outrunning death.” And when she was in high school, he left their Long Island, New York, home for his native Hong Kong, creating a gulf between them that’s troubled the author ever since.
In On Muscle, Tsui displays the journalistic prowess and love for sport that made 2020’s Why We Swim a bestseller as she considers how muscle powers and supports us via fascinating interviews, experiential research (including observing an anatomical dissection) and scientific exploration of the mind-body connection. She also movingly shares her experience of parental estrangement: Can her finely tuned muscles help her to emotionally stretch, flex, endure?
Remarkable interview subjects include Jan Todd, the first woman to lift Scotland’s Dinnie Stones (773 pounds) and co-founder of the expansive H.J. Lutcher Stark Center for Physical Culture and Sports at the University of Texas at Austin. Tsui visits Dan O’Conor, who in June 2020 began daily jumps into Lake Michigan and became a social media sensation, exemplifying how “the body can lead in elevating the spirit.” And, she wonders, “How can paying attention to muscle solve for the unsolvable circumstances of injury and illness?” Minneapolis-based adaptive yoga pioneer Matthew Sanford offers compelling answers: After a devastating car crash, he strove to engage his entire body, contrary to doctors’ recommendations to ignore the parts of his body left paralyzed. As Tsui learned, his work indeed helps students of varying abilities experience “the wisdom of bodies as a continuum.”
On Muscle will help readers attain that wisdom, too, thanks to its multifaceted celebration of muscles’ importance to body and mind, physicality and identity. Tsui has crafted an appealing, enlightening guide to understanding and appreciating our own strength.
Source link
