The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

Readers of Sherlock Holmes stories may recall that the detective clipped stories from newspapers related to crimes, or unusual stories in which Holmes detected the hint of a crime. Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, did the same thing, and he had a collection of books related to crime. This is just one aspect of himself that Doyle put into the fictional detective.

Doyle’s interest in crime, and particularly in defending those he felt were unjustly prosecuted, sometimes led him into investigating crimes. Peter Costello describes some of these crimes and investigations in The Real World of Sherlock Holmes.

Perhaps the most celebrated case, and the case in which Doyle conducted himself as a Holmes-like detective, was the case of George Edalji. Edalji, a solicitor born to an Indian father and English mother, was convicted of a series of animal mutilations. Doyle believed the case against him was week, based mainly on poison-pen letters accusing the young man. As he began to investigate, he found sloppy investigative techniques, openly racist police leadership, an incompetent counsel contributed to the wrongful conviction. Doyle investigated further and even collected evidence indicating that someone else was the culprit. Through his investigation, along with pressure he brought through the media and influential acquaintances, he won a pardon for Edalji.

When Doyle became so deeply involved in a case, he was usually motivated to correct what he saw as a miscarriage of justice. He was not so active in his investigation of other crimes. Doyle studied crimes he found interesting. More often than not, these were inquiries at a distance as he read books and newspaper accounts, and discussed crimes with other interested people. He was even a member of “Our Society,” a secretive crime club that discussed the details of crime and developments in criminology in its after-dinner meetings. Some of the members were lawyers and forensic scientists (still a new profession) who were actively involved in investigating or prosecuting crimes.

Costello suggests that some of these crimes inspired Doyle’s stories. It makes sense that they would. Doyle always made significant changes when he adapted a true crime to a fictional story, so no Sherlock Holmes story could be described as a close, though fictionalized, recreation of a true crime.

Doyle remained interested in crime throughout his life, but by the 1920s he was focused on promoting spiritualism. Even when he investigated a crime in this era, it was usually because of an element of spiritualism touching the case. He encouraged the use of clairvoyants and mediums by the police. When Agatha Christie disappeared, his investigation consisted of a consultation with medium Horace Leaf. (Journalists, passing on clairvoyance to use more Holmes-like detection, found Christie staying at a resort under an assumed name.)

If you’re interested in this book, you may also interested in

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Fic by Anne Jamison

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

The Peerless Peer by Philip Jose Farmer

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Costello, Peter. The Real World of Sherlock Holmes: The True Crimes Investigated by Arthur Conan Doyle. New York: Carrol & Graf, 1991.

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

Novelist Henry James seems like an unlikely partner to fictional detective Sherlock Holmes. Dan Simmons pairs them in his novel The Fifth Heart. James provides Holmes with access to the inner circle of American politics, where Holmes investigates the death of Clover Adams, wife of historian Henry Adams. Together, they thwart an attempt to assassinate President Grover Cleveland at the opening of the Chicago Columbian Exhibition.

In some ways, Simmons draws from the weakest of genre writing, such as the fortunate happenstance of James and Holmes meeting on the bank of the Seine, where the story begins. Simmons writing in this style is not weak, though. He also writes in more literary style, though not a densely written as James’ novels, and uses the likes of upper-class dinner parties to explore social customs and mores.

One of the ways Simmons creates a deep sense of the setting is by constantly dropping names. Many of the characters in the book, or their real counterparts, were famous or well-connected in their day and actually knew each other, such as Adams, the Hays, James, and Samuel Clemens. They also knew, or knew about, a lot of other famous or well-connected people, so the discussion of all these names seems natural. I started jotting down the names, and I recorded more than 100 (some are listed below). Some were fictional (like Hercule Poirot), but many were real people.

On the whole, the novel is a good adventure full of interesting characters. Simmons goes a little deep into philosophy in a consideration of what it means to be a real person, or the potential reality of fictional people (Holmes suspects he may be fictional). The book can be enjoyed without sweating that point.

In a sense, all the characters in the book are fictional, even if they are based on real people. The Holmes of this novel describes the symptoms that indicate he may be fiction, such as the fog he experiences between adventures, and the James of this novel experiences the same thing. Of course, many of us experience arriving home from work and having almost no recollection of driving, so some fogginess may be a natural part of memories and the way we form them (or don’t form them).

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Fic by Anne Jamison

The Peerless Peer by Philip Jose Farmer

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Simmons, Dan. The Fifth Heart. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015.

Henry Adams

Marian (Clover) Hooper Adams

Irene Adler [fictional]

Alexander Agassiz

William Waldorf Astor

Henry Ward Beecher

John Bonfield

Paul Bourget

William G. Brock

Daniel Hudson Burnam

James Donald Cameron

Walter Camp

Enrico Caruso

Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain)

Frances Folsom Cleveland

Grover Cleveland

Willkie Collins

Edward Compton

Stephen Crane

Captain Sir George Mansfield Smith Cumming

Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll)

Montague Druitt (suspected of being Jack the Ripper)

Andrew L. Drummond

Edmund Gosse

H. Rider Haggard

Carter Henry Harrison

Adelbert “Del” Hay

Clara Hay

Helen Julia Hay

John Hay

Sven Anders Hedin

Mycroft Holmes [fictional character]

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

Sherlock Holmes [fictional character]

Isabella Beecher Hooker

Edward Hooper

William Dean Howells

Victoria Woodhull

Henry Irving

Henry James

Francis Scott Key

Phillip Barton Key

Clarence King

Rudyard Kipling

Peter Kropotkin

Fritz Krupp

Louis Jean-Baptist Lepine

Henry Cabot Lodge

Robert McClaughry

George McClellan

Charles Macready

Errico Maltesta

William Melville

Sebastian Moran [fictional character]

James Nolan Moriarty [fictional character]

Richard Monckton Milnes

Carl Gottfried Neumann

Charles H. Pearson

Hercule Poirot [fictional character]

Henry Rathbone

Elisee Reclus

Henrietta Reubell

Henry Hobson Richardson

Edmund Rice

Elizabeth Robins

William Rockhill

Theodore Roosevelt

John Singer Sargent

Rudolph Schnaubelt

Heinrich Schliemann

William Seward

Daniel Sickles

Teresa Bagioli Sickles

Ainsworth Rand Spofford

Edwin Stanton

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

Adlai E. Stevenson

Robert Louis Stevenson

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Benjamin Tayloe

Annie Royle Taylor

Minnie Temple

Emile Jean-Horace Vernet

Carl Aver von Welsbach

A. B. Walkley

Fanny White

Garnet Wolseley

Constance Fenimore Woolson

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

Nicholas Meyer plays The Game. He presents his novel, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, as a found manuscript of John Watson, friend to and chronicler of the adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective inspired pastiches and fan fiction even during the time when he was writing the canon of Holmes stories. Meyer even mentions Doyle in the book, though in keeping with The Game, he alludes that he is something like a literary agent, helping Watson place his recollections in magazines.

The occasion of the reference to Doyle is his connection to both Watson and Doyle’s medical studies in Vienna, where most of the story is set. According to Meyer, neither the real life or fictional version of Doyle met another famous physician who resided in Vienna. That physician’s expertise in a certain specialty is the reason Watson and Holmes visit the European mainland.

After Watson marries and moves out of the Baker Street apartment, Holmes is more tightly gripped by his addiction to cocaine, the seven percent solution mentioned Doyle’s The Sign of Four and the title of Meyer’s book. Overcoming addiction was beyond the expertise of Watson and his medical colleagues, but the work of a Viennese physician gave him hope. Watson conspires with Sherlock’s brother Mycroft, and even enlists the aid of the old Holmes family math tutor Moriarty, to trick Holmes into going to Vienna to be placed in the care of Sigmund Freud.

The first half of the book deals with Holmes’ addiction and his treatment in the home of Freud. This is more interesting than some may think it sounds, and even in this section Meyer maintains the feel of a Holmes story.

In the second half, Freud’s consultation in the case of a silent patient prompts the kind of detective story you expect to see Holmes in. Freud is along for the ride and his insights prove useful to the detective. The physical side of the adventure ramps us in this part, too. The climax (can you do a spoiler alert for a 40-year-old book) is a saber duel between Holmes and the story’s villain on the top of a speeding railcar.

Meyer sticks close to the canon, though he does it by discrediting certain “disputed” stories. The long-retired Watson, dictating this after the death of his friend, admits to fabricating certain tales in order to protect Holmes’ life and reputation.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Fic by Anne Jamison

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Meyer, Nicholas. The Seven-Per-Cent Solution: Being a Reprint from the Reminiscences of John H. Watson, M.D. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1974.

A Slight Trick of the Mind by Mitch Cullin

In A Slight Trick of the Mind, Mitch Cullin imagines the life of an aged Sherlock Holmes. He has lived through two world wars and seen most of his closest friends and family die. He is a man with no place in the world, and even the little place he has separated out for himself cannot hold back time.

This is not a crime story, but it deals with mysteries. These are not mysteries in the secret society sense of things revealed only to the cognoscenti. They are mysteries in the Christian sense of things that are beyond the understanding of man. The Holmes of this book is struggling with memory, death, war, abandonment, relationships, and grief. Even with diminished capacity, Holmes can tell how a boy died. What Holmes can’t grasp is how this boy he had come to love should die for no apparent reason while he has lived long after his place in the world faded away.

I have always thought that part of the appeal of Holmes was his humanity. Though he has a cool demeanor and focuses on reason, these things don’t motivate him. Beneath the surface is a passion for justice and a compassion for his fellow man. Cullin captures both of these sides of a very old Holmes who is struggling with mysteries that stump us all.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

The Peerless Peer by Philip Jose Farmer

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Cullin, Mitch. A Slight Trick of the Mind. 2005. New York: Anchor, 2006.

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Moore, Graham. The Sherlockian. New York: Twelve, 2010.

In The Sherlockian, Graham Moore tells two stories, both crime tales that are linked by a missing diary. In the modern story, a newly inducted member of the Baker Street Irregulars, a prominent group of Sherlock Holmes fan-scholars, sets out to solve a murder that occurs at a convention of the Irregulars. Seeking the solution to this mystery leads him to another, the attempt to find a lost diary of Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Holmes.

The second story is historical. It features Doyle and his friend Bram Stoker, author of Dracula. Doyle similarly starts out to solve one mystery and gets draw into another. He sets out to discover who sent him a letter bomb that actually contains a letter, though Doyle narrowly escapes death from the bomb. It leads him into seeking the killer of young women who are joined by radical politics and an odd tattoo.

The first track reads as much like a suspense-thriller than a mystery, though the hero is decidedly nerdier than is typical of such stories, as you might expect of a guy who has had is head buried in books for years. The Doyle story begins as something similar to the stories the actual man wrote to showcase his famous character, the fictional detective
he killed to be rid of then brought back to life. It becomes more realistic at progress, or at least much messier.

Though mostly serious in tone, the book has humorous moments. The hero is a guy who has found a way to make a living from having read a ton of books. His chief credential as a detective is that he knows a lot about Sherlock Holmes. He’s not the only Sherlockian to involve himself in the case; he is simply more competent and lucky than the others.



The historical touches are interesting. The real Doyle consulted with Scotland Yard, with varying success, though the crime described in The Sherlockian is fictional. Some of his papers, including a diary, disappeared after his death and resurfaced more than 70 years later in the hands of a distant Doyle relative. A battle of words and lawyers ensued involving the would-be seller of these documents, the Doyle heirs, and a prominent Irregular. The Irregular died under suspicious circumstances and the case is still considered unsolved in spite of the efforts of police and many amateur detectives. These real events inspired the book, though the author clearly distinguishes in a short note the touch of history from the mass of fiction.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
The Book of Lies by Brad Meltzer
The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont
The Great Stink by Clare Clark

The Peerless Peer by Philip Jose Farmer

I usually review nonfiction books on this blog (a likely cause of no one reading it). Sometimes I read a fiction book that I enjoy so much, I comment on it anyway.

The Peerless Peer is such a book. Philip Jose Farmer brings together Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan in the heart of Africa. Holmes and Watson are on a mission to retrieve a formula that could change the course of World War I by destroying all the fish and chips. Along the way, Holmes sorts out certain points of the Greystoke family history that are “wrong” in the sensational jungle king novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Farmer throws in cameos and name-dropping of a host of popular and pulp heroes. On their first two, back-to-back airplane flights, Holmes and Watson have the mixed blessings of being piloted by G-8 (possibly The Spider) and The Shadow. They obviously meet Tarzan, and unexpectedly meet the daughter of Allan Quatermain. Along the way, they interact with Henry Merrivale and Gideon Fell. As a player of The Game, Farmer describes how Watson’s previously unpublished manuscript came to him through a chain of provenance that included Lord Peter Wimsey.

If you’re looking for a short, fun, pulpy, nostalgic novel, this will do. It is fun.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont

Pulp Art by Robert Lesser

The Seven-Per-Cent Solution by Nicholas Meyer

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson

Levenson, Thomas. Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the Worlds Greatest Scientist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009.

Scientists who become detectives have been the stuff of fiction before CSI: launched it into great popularity. Even Sherlock Holmes was a capable amateur scientist, though his scientific inquiries were aimed at making him a better detective. Though the scientist as detective is a fairly popular form of crime literature, the truth of it in one case is stranger than fiction.

Isaac Newton, renowned in his own day as well as ours as one of the greatest physicists who ever lived, left his post at Cambridge University to take a more lucrative patronage job as Warden of the Mint. One of his ostensible duties as warden was to investigate and prosecute cases of counterfeiting. It would be something like appointing Stephen Hawking to direct the Secret Service.

Typically, holders of this position weren’t expected to do more than the minimum required, leaving most of the work to assistants. Newton took his post seriously and pursued crime fighting with the same discipline and analytical rigor he used as a scientist while also completely re-minting all of England’s silver coins.

Readers who are already familiar with Newton’s scientific life might find that Levenson devotes too much of the book to it. His alchemical studies are more important to his work as warden because, even though esoteric from a scientific view, it made him familiar with the material as methods used by the mint and counterfeiters.

Newton put away (or to death) many counterfeiters. Levenson focuses on one, William Chaloner. Chaloner was an extraordinarily successful counterfeiter at his peak and much more ambitious and smart than most of his fellows. Where Newton’s life before the mint gets too much attention, Chaloner’s life doesn’t get enough. Since he was famous mostly for his crimes and some details of a counterfeiter’s life are necessarily hidden, there is probably much less source material to use to reconstruct his life.


The book builds up a little slowly through Newton’s younger day and then seems to rush through his mastership of the mint and his battle of wits with Chaloner. In spite of this weakness, the book is an interesting look on a lesser know chapter of Newton’s life.

Circles by James Burke

Circles is a collection of essays that science journalist James Burke wrote for Scientific American. These 50 short histories focus on science and technology, as you might expect from the magazine that originally published them. Burke also covers culture and literature, which are inextricably tangled in those other subjects anyway.

The conceit of these essays is that they start and end at more or less the same place, making a circle. These trips through history, like history itself, are hardly tidy little circles. Burke skips from place to place, person to person, and period to period like a mad time traveler. The jumps are not random, each step has a connection to its predecessor, eventually finding a connection back to the starting point. Even so, the effect is sometimes chaotic.

I think Burke wanted to convey something of the chaos of history. It is easy to look at the history of some bit of science or technology and see it as a clearly delineated arc. We make superhighways from early concept to full-fledged idea and fly by everything else without noticing it. Burke takes the scenic route, noting the oddball side trips and serendipitous stumbles that are the typical milestones of our creeping advancement in knowledge.

The approach doesn’t allow Burke to dive deep into any subject, but that is not what he wanted to do. That is why I would recommend it to other amateur historians. You can play the honeybee with Burke, flitting from flower to flower and sipping the nectar of each. Along the way you are likely something that intrigues you. You could start a historical journey of your own.

James Burke also wrote The Pinball Effect.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Better for All the World by Harry Bruinius

The Brooklyn Bridge by Judith St. George

Canals and Their Architecture by Robert Harris

Copernicus’ Secret by Jack Repcheck

Descarte’s Secret Notebook by Amir D. Aczel

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

The Ghost Map by Steven Johnson

The Great Bridge by David McCollough

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson

The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst

Majestie by David Teems

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

On a Grander Scale by Lisa Jardine

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

War Against the Weak by Edwin Black

Burke, James. Circles: 50 Round Trips through History, Technology, Science, Culture. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000.

Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein

I won’t say much about Gabrielle Bernstein’s Super Attractor. There is something about it that turns me off. I suspect my biases are usually clear, though I don’t often state them as explicitly as I do here.

Much of what you’ll find in term of advice is in Super Attractor is similar to what you might find in other self-help books. It has the New Age perspective that is common among many books of this genre, especially in the wake of Oprah’s popularizing of books such as The Secret.

Bernstein goes a step farther in reviving Spiritualism. She essentially claims to be a medium (though she doesn’t use the word) who is in touch with a spirit guide—and you can be, too. I do not know if she is a sham or if she is playing with fire, but it is a path I cannot take or recommend on either scientific of religious grounds.

“Fear is a gentle reminder of what you don’t want, and therefore it helps you clarify what you do want,” Gabriell Bernstein, Super Attractor

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Acres of Diamonds by Russel H. Conwell

As a Man Thinketh by James Allen

Make Miracles in Forty Days by Melody Beattie

Night of the Ghouls (film)

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

The Secret by Rhonda Byrne

The Secret of the Ages by Robert Collier

Bernstein, Gabrielle. Super Attractor: Methods for Manifesting a Life Beyond Your Wildest Dreams. Carlsbad, CA: Hay House, 2019.

The Apparitionist by Peter Manseau

Photography was introduced to the United States at around the same time that a new religion was born in the nation. Spiritualism promised a connection to the dead in their realm through human mediums, and some thought photography might capture physical manifestations of spirits. Peter Manseau tells the story of the first spirit photographer in The Apparitionist.

The man who captured the first supposed spirit photograph was an amateur at the time. William Mumler thought he had made in error in cleaning the glass on which the photonegative was captured when a faint image appeared in a self-portrait he shot in 1862. He was using the photo studio owned by Hannah Stuart. The married photographer, soon to be widowed and soon after that to be Mrs. Mumler, was a Spiritualist, and she convinced him that the image was not an error, but an apparition. The photos caught the attention of the Spiritualist press, first in the New York-based Herald of Progress, then in Mumler’s hometown of Boston in the Beacon of Light, which published the address of the Stuart studio.

Soon the studio was producing many spirit photographs; they even took orders by mail from across the country. Bostonian Spiritualists compared photos and found evidence that Mumler was faking the images. Discredited, the Mumler’s moved to New York to quietly offer spirit photographs again. Their practice there let to criminal prosecution in 1869. Photographers knew of ways to produce such images, but no investigators could figure out what Mumler was doing. Though the judge gave did not suggest the photos actually captured images of spirits, he rejected the prosecution’s case because it did not adequately support the charges of fraud and similar crimes.

Even with such tepid vindication, the atmosphere in New York was too hot for the Mumlers, so they returned to Boston. Though Mumler continued to take spirit photos, he had developed a much deeper understanding of the art and science of photography. He developed a process that allowed for the direct reproduction of photos on newsprint; founded the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston and licensed his process to companies in other cities. This allowed newspapers and magazines to less expensively reproduce images without preparing an engraving first.

Manseau also discussed the development of photography in the United States after the art was introduced here. This includes American pioneers of photography such as Samuel Morse, also inventor of the telegraph, and Civil War battlefield photographers Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Billion Dollar Whale by Tom Wright and Bradley Hope

Buried Alive by Jan Bondeson

Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiaverini

The Explorer King by Robert Wilson

The Man Who Loved Books too Much by Allison Hoover Bartlett

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman

Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein

Manseau, Peter. The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.

Case Closed (Vol. 2) by Gosho Ayoama

Gosho Ayoama. Case Closed. Vol. 2. 1994. San Francisco: VIZ, 2004.

Case Closed is a collection of short detective stories in comic form (manga). They were originally published in Japan under the title “Meitantei Conan” (Detective Conan). That is the straightforward part.

The hero is a teenager with a genius for solving crime, Jimmy Kudo. He stumbles onto something and a crime organization poisons him. Instead of killing him, the drug shrinks him down to the size of a first grader. He commits himself to finding the men who did it. To protect himself and his friends for the criminals who think he is dead, he takes on the name Conan Edogawa (from mystery authors Conan Doyle and Rumpo Edogawa) and takes up with his unsuspecting girlfriend, Rachel, and her father, mediocre private investigator Richard Moore. To get this back-story, you’ll need to read the first volume or see early episodes of the anime series that closely follows the manga.



Other than that, the stories are straightforward tales of ratiocination in the Western tradition started by Edgar Allen Poe and taken up so well by Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes stories. For someone interested in getting familiar with manga, Japanese comics, this may be a good place to start. The mystery story is familiar to Westerners and the art is in the manga style.

This particular volume has three stories. Gosho Ayoama’s method is to present a complete mystery story and occasionally include stories that touch on Jimmy’s broader quest to return to his normal size and bring his shrinkers to justice. You don’t have to be invested in the larger story to enjoy reading the individual mysteries.

Though Jimmy appears to be a young child, and has adventures with kids from his elementary school class, the stories are not for children. There is murder and other crimes, violence and gore, and children in imminent danger. Conan has a particular knack for provoking killers into coming after him.

Lift by Daniel Kunitz

Trends in fitness in the 2000s have given to new sports, such as the CrossFit games, and new athletic entertainments in the form of American Ninja Warrior. Daniel Kunitz traces the rise of this new fitness culture, which he calls New Frontier Fitness or NFF, in his Lift.

 Kunitz goes back to the ancient Greeks, who revered physical beauty and fitness and considered it the obligation of citizens (only men were citizens) to keep themselves in good shape in order to serve and defend their nation. The Greek word for this training was askesis.

 The English word asceticism has it root in askesis. While we now associate it with self-denial, the Greeks associated it with purposeful self-discipline. Participants in NFF have embraced this old-fashioned asceticism, training purposefully with benefits that spill into all areas of life.

 As an aside, Christian asceticism is often associated with self-denial, sometime extreme, for the purpose of penance. When I read Paul’s writing on denial of self, I see it described in the context of disciplining oneself with the purpose of living a higher life. He even uses athletes as an example. He is not denigrating athletes for training for a worthless prize. He is reminding Christians that they have and even more important calling that deserves at least an equal commitment and effort.

 Of course, few cultures since then have reveled in physical achievement. Exercise at times has been considered dangerous to health. Weightlifting too much resembles labor, a task for lower-class people that wealthy and middle-class people were reluctant to embrace. Even when exercise became more acceptable, starting in the 1960s and taking off in the 1980s, the focus was often on appearance.

 NFF is not concerned with appearance. It is concerned with performance. If one trains to perform well, appearance will take care of itself.

 Because of this focus on function, NFF eschews many of the machines found in gyms. Exercises resemble tasks one might actually perform, though with greater intensity intended to push skill and physical capacity. NFF participants train like an athlete, constantly reaching to do better, not to look better but to live better. As Kunitz says several times, they are “training for life.”

 From a historical point of view, Lift covers a lot of the same ground as Making the American Body by Jonathan Black. However, Kunitz is specifically intending to give context to NFF and its influence on how people think about being fit today.

 Though Kunitz is a professional writer, he is also a fan of NFF. He practices CrossFit, which he discusses in the book, and Olympic lifting. He also talks to people who train in other functional regimes like parkour and sweatier forms of yoga.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Mr. America by Mark Adams

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

 Kunitz, Daniel. Lift: Fitness Culture, from Naked Greeks and Acrobats to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors. New York: Harper Wave, 2016.