ON MUSCLE

From journalist, lifelong athlete, and bestselling author of Why We Swim, a fascinating exploration of our ancient obsession with the ideal human form and the modern science of how we move through the worldincluding the author's own muscular adventuresreminding us that using our muscles promotes longevity, joy, and connectionand, most important, the feeling that we can do anything.

In On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui invites us to join her as she engages with the nuts and bolts of muscles as well as their myth, meaning, and metaphor. In big ways and small, life is a movement-based relationship with everything around us. Cardiac, smooth, skeletalthese three different types of muscle in our bodies make our hearts beat; push food through our intestines, blood through our vessels, babies out the uterus; attach to our bones and help us move. Individually, they do different things. Collectively, they drive us through our days. As in her bestselling Why We Swim, Tsui jumps into the action. She joins a Double Dutch jump rope club in Washington, DCproving that joy is a muscle; she leaps into Lake Michigan with a Chicagoan who does so daily; she practices yoga with a paraplegic man who has found a way to access his muscles; she joins a 50-mile run to commemorate the cruelties of Native American boarding schools, where muscle endurance becomes a metaphor; she talks with the first female weightlifter to pick up the famed Scottish Dinnie Stones; she witnesses a dissection to really "see" muscles; and she travels to Oslo where cutting-edge research is helping us learn how muscles can bounce back after falls and injury, an important aspect of longevity. Filled with fascinating facts and plenty of food for thought, On Muscle is at once a captivating meditation on bodies in motion and a thoughtful examination of our societal expectations, revealing the many ways those ideas can limit what we're really capable of. Woven through this cultural and literary flex is Tsui's messy but loving relationship with her sometimes absent father who instilled in her a love of exercise. At the end of her investigation, she realizes that when he taught her to lift heavy things, he was teaching her to lift herself. Bonnie Tsui is a longtime contributor to The New York Times and the bestselling author of Why We Swim, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and a Time magazine and NPR Best Book of the Year; it is currently being translated into ten languages. Tsui is also the author of American Chinatown, which won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and Sarah and the Big Wave, a children's book about the first woman to surf Mavericks and a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection. Her work has been recognized and supported by Harvard University, the National Press Foundation, the Mesa Refuge, and the Best American Essays series. She lives, swims, and surfs in the Bay Area, and her website is bonnietsui.com.