Customer Reviews

American Idle: A Journey Through Our Sedentary Culture (Capital Ideas Series) (Captial Ideas)

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It is high time we open our eyes to the reality of the wrongheadedness of our American lifestyle and how we contribute to it daily. It is particularly appropriate considering all the conversation re the health system in this country and how it is failing us-- maybe we are doing more to fail ourselves-- our children, our culture. Collins style makes this a thoroughly readable and (hard to believe due to the subject matter) enjoyable book.

Mary Collins truly brings a new outlook to understanding movement, exercise, and health, and how they fit into the fabric of life. A great, thought-provoking read.

American Idle: A Journey Through Our Sedentary Culture by Mary Collins is such an interesting take on our way of life in North America. The physically active author had a severe bike accident, which drastically impaired her health. In her eagerness to regain some mobile abilities she began a study of movement and its ability to empower us. She began to realize how important being outdoors in green space is and that adults and children in our culture live almost entirely indoors and don't move their bodies any more than necessary. Collins has spent years studying the importance of movement and outdoor exercise to our overall health and writes about her findings, including physical, mental, and spiritual. Many interesting findings and simple ways to alter our family lives are included in this astonishing book. A must read!

Surely none but Mary Collins, a preternaturally gifted teacher, editor, and flat-out terrific storyteller, could have pulled off making a distasteful reality so appealing.

The reality?

We're sunk, we Americans, in a morass of self-imposed sluggishness that hasn't budged despite billions of dollars invested in getting us to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, or jockstraps, or whatever bits and bytes we can manage to leverage ourselves into a more mobile and vibrant lifestyle.

The horrid truth of our longstanding National decline that measures back to the Eisenhower years (at least!) is unappetizing, yet Collins invests it with all sorts of unprecedented treatments and unexpected viewing angles. Each chapter could stand alone; combined, they're well nigh irresistable.

From taking us inside the exalted Olympic training facility, to skirting the dubious underside of video gaming, Mary Collins has taken her quest to figure out the Why of America's effectively wounded "corpus" to extraordinary lengths. And we get to come along for the ride. Read, and heed, the lessons Collins lays out for us in each chapter, and -- if you dare -- take the quiz at the end.

Collins took on this theme because she dam near lost her own mobility in a bicycle accident that might have killed, or permanently crippled, a less determined soul. Though she started out, she says, a little arrogant in her assumptions, she ended up humbled, and considerably wiser. Reading her saga, her journey into the heart of the American meltdown, is calculated to make us wiser, and maybe humbled too. Kind of gives a new resonance to the term Activist.

I always feel best when my legs are moving at a brisk walk, lungs expanding to breathe deeply, eyes and ears keenly aware of my surroundings. But I never knew why this type of exercise suits me so perfectly ... until I read American Idle.

The author, Mary Collins, has a great love of "vigor," however a bicycle accident and back surgery ended years of pick-up basketball games and intense physical exercise. "I was stunned," the author says, "that my physical life had contracted to that of an average American person [who] voluntarily gave up so much physical zest and pleasure." As her body heals, the author embarks on an intensely personal investigation of how important movement is to her .. and to the American public.

At an archeological dig in Kansas, Collins discovers that humans are "long trekkers right down to the shape of our ankles." In order to guarantee an adequate supply, our hunter-gatherer ancestors walked seven to nine hours a day in search of food. Humans have lived by this rule for 200,000 years and, the author concludes, this need for continuous exercise still exists in all of us today. Yet, 65 percent of Americans consider exercise inconvenient, unimportant and not necessary.

Collins explores exercise's relationship to brain cell growth with a scientist at the Salk Institute, movement an body language with an advocate of the Laban Method, then takes a long walk with a city planner through New York neighborhoods and public spaces saved from 1950s urban development.

The author concludes that due to a lack of exercise, Americans are living in "some sort of collective depressed state" and that the average "American child is in a weird state of physical torpor, mental overload, and sensory shut down." She urges all of us to assert our "right to joyful, recuperative movement" and to allow "exercise to become about vitality, not fitness."

What a great read! Each chapter is a separate adventure.

I confronted my own prejudice and bias about people less fit than me, as I read this book. For all of the discourse, programs, legislation and discovery about exercise , movement, diet, and their benefits, we are no more active as a country than we were during the Eisenhower administration--how can that be?

Mary's book is a pager-turner journey of discovery, fueled by her quest to reclaim her own physical grace after a horrific accident--and what a journey it is, from a Hunter-Gatherer archeological site, to the US Olympic Center, to a Harley -Davidson plant...

It is easy for books like this to point from the sidelines at all that is wrong. Mary not only chronicles the transforming root causes of our "idle" lives (surprise, It's not just a question of will power/ discipline!) but also suggests/ chronicles solutions that are sustainable or already working. Bravo.