Word: farrar
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...right, that was an easy one. The year was 1996, and the adviser was Dick Morris (and no, they couldn't stop the story). The scene is from The Clinton Wars (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 822 pages), Sidney Blumenthal's long-awaited, overlong account of his years at the White House, which, in rare moments, has some of the you-are-there, walk-with-me charm and snap of the TV show...
...Exercise is my obsession," declares New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata. Her preference is "spinning," a brutal workout on a stationary bike, which she describes in detail in her new book, Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health (Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Kolata does many tasks in her book, describing her life as an ardent exerciser, tracing the history of working out ("Eating alone will not keep a man well," said Hippocrates in 400 B.C. "He must also take exercise") and debunking popular claims (e.g., endorphins and running highs are overrated, she says). Kolata concludes that exercise...
...stagger across the finish line together in the fastest time possible. Although the sport was first taken up by rugged outdoorsmen, women have embraced it enthusiastically. Because teamwork and stamina are as important as brute strength, coed teams tend to finish higher than all-male ones, says Troy Farrar of the U.S. Adventure Racing Association (USARA), and it isn't unusual to see parents and their children canoeing and rappelling together...
Both themes (in that order) figure in Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 555 pages), an ingeniously woven literary tapestry that tells the stories of four great American Catholic writers of the 20th century--Percy, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Merton and Dorothy...
...Elie's deeply moving study, imperfection is both the starting point of spiritual journeys and the stuff of which wisdom literature is made. Elie, an editor at Farrar, Straus & Giroux, uses the four authors' lives and work--their pilgrimages, as he says--to explore "a larger story of the convergence of literature and religion in the 20th century" and to learn from their complicated struggles toward God in a country that is at the same time abnormally religious and unusually devoted to Mammon...