Although I agree with my goodreads friend Elyssa that it would be interesting to see this same study conductThis was interesting and very convincing.
Although I agree with my goodreads friend Elyssa that it would be interesting to see this same study conducted with a younger generation (the subjects of this longitudinal study were mostly born in the 1920s), I found this surprisingly consistent with what I perceive as the stages of development of my contemporaries (and me) and even of my nephews and friends' sons, etc. who are in their 20s and 30s now, and who seem in so many other ways to have grown up in and to be living in such a very different world from me.
Even the fairly narrow age ranges of the development stages the author defines seem to be as applicable to these subjects as they are or were to my age cohort and as they seem to be to men born 20 years before or after me. I would not have thought so....more
This wasn't as good as I expected it to be, having read lots of very interesting and very readable Gina Kolata pieces in the Science Times over the yeThis wasn't as good as I expected it to be, having read lots of very interesting and very readable Gina Kolata pieces in the Science Times over the years.
The chapter on exercise addiction, "Is There a Runner's High?" was really fascinating, and a lot of it was new information to me. I liked the parts about exercise pioneers or entrepreneurs like Joe Weider and Bob Hoffman (and Jack LaLanne and Charles Atlas, who are mentioned in passing a few times), but most of this book and the findings and anecdotes in it were really not all that interesting to me I guess.
There's a lot about "spinning" in this book (which I had never even heard of before), so if you're interested in spinning (or regular cycling), you might like this book more than I did.
I'm giving it 3 stars instead of 2 because of how great that addiction chapter was and because I did like some other parts, too. ...more
This was a good book. Entertaining and interesting and a good summary of American business from 1945 to 1986, I thought.
This was one of my favorite pThis was a good book. Entertaining and interesting and a good summary of American business from 1945 to 1986, I thought.
This was one of my favorite passages:
"On the surface, of course, America's postwar ethos, far from being collectivist, was the purest distillation of the credo of free enterprise. Individual opportunity, the salutary effects of competition, the fertile Darwinian chemistry of 150 million versions of self-interest colliding--those were the keynotes of the orthodox morality, and with the Cold War heating up, they *had* to be. The Commies had their system, we had ours; it was patriotic to assert and even exaggerate the differences between the two, and it would have been vaguely subversive to suggest that they might have any similarities at all.
"In fact, however, the America of that day had an inclusive notion of itself that, except for the overlay of ideology, was not very different from that of any other tribe. America had a flag, a mythology, and a mission. The mission, by its very nature, was essentially communal: to foster such a golden age of peace and plenty, that, in accordance with the notion of grace made manifest, the whole world would realize we were *right*. America would fulfill its promise not by turning out a million millionaires--that was the easy part--but by providing *everyone* with a polio shot, a supply of Keds and Levis, and two weeks' paid vacation. Our national glory--and the day's editorial writers did elaborate dances to to get this point across without sounding socialistic--lay in our promotion of the common weal; a crime against the common weal, in the name of business expediency or anything else, was thought of as a very real crime."
***
I think that characterization of postwar America is so spot-on and so accurate, and I always find it ironic that the one thing that all of my right-leaning friends from my generation have in common is that they all idealize this era, and want to return to it, and yet the politics that they mistakenly support today and the ideology they mistakenly espouse today are usually so antithetical to realizing the type of America that they are so nostalgic for.
I'm often nostalgic for that American era, too, which is one of the reasons I enjoyed reading this book....more
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