Feb 21: Bill Hayes & Alison Bechdel in Conversation With Bill Goldstein

Bill Hayes & Alison Bechdel in Conversation With Bill Goldstein Monday, February 21 @ 5pm (PT) Register for the Zoom event   Buy the Book (Hayes)   Buy the Book (Bechdel)

From Insomniac City author Bill Hayes, "who can tackle just about any subject… and make you glad he did" (San Francisco Chronicle), comes Sweat (Bloomsbury), a cultural, scientific, and personal history of exercise. Exercise is our modern obsession, and we have the fancy workout gear and fads from HIIT to spin classes to hot yoga to prove it. Exercise — a form of physical activity distinct from sports, play, or athletics — was an ancient obsession, too, but as a chapter in human history, it's been largely overlooked. In Sweat, Hayes runs, jogs, swims, spins, walks, bikes, boxes, lifts, sweats, and downward-dogs his way through the origins of different forms of exercise, chronicling how they have evolved over time, dissecting the dynamics of human movement. Hayes ties his own personal experience — and ours — to the cultural and scientific history of exercise, from ancient times to the present day, giving us a new way to understand its place in our lives in the twenty-first century. In The Secret to Superhuman Strength (Mariner), comics and cultural superstar Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home, delivers a deeply layered story of her fascination, from childhood to adulthood, with every fitness craze to come down the pike: from Jack LaLanne in the '60s ("Outlandish jumpsuit! Cantaloupe-sized guns!") to the existential oddness of present-day spin class. Readers will see their athletic or semi-active pasts flash before their eyes through an ever-evolving panoply of running shoes, bicycles, skis, and sundry other gear. But the more Bechdel tries to improve herself, the more her self appears to be the thing in her way. This gifted artist and not-getting-any-younger exerciser comes to a soulful conclusion. The secret to superhuman strength lies not in six-pack abs, but in something much less clearly defined: facing her own non-transcendent but all-important interdependence with others. Hayes and Bechdel will be joined in conversation by Bill Goldstein, book reviewer and author interviewer for NBC's "Weekend Today in New York" and founding editor of the books site of The New York Times on the Web.