Customer Reviews

Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle

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Steven Vogel's Prime Mover provides a natural history of muscles and how they work, from exploring artificial and natural muscles in other creatures and in man's creations to understanding the power and limitations of the human muscle. Biomechanics comes alive in a discussion blending science, health, history, and mechanical insights.

This book is written in such an engaging and accessible style, it would be an entertaining read for anyone who enjoys reading about science. Because it is written by a university professor and noted scholar with plenty of documentation, it would also be an excellent textbook for biology classes in secondary schools, colleges or even universities. It has 370 pages and includes a table of contents, plenty of illustrations, a list of references, and useful and informative endnotes.

The author, Steven Vogel, Ph.D., is a professor of biology at Duke University in Durham, NC. Dr. Vogel has won the Irving and Jean Stone Prize for Science Writing for Public Understanding, and I can understand why. He makes very complicated biological processes clear and understandable to a lay audience. He works in the field of biomechanics and has written many other books besides this one for the lay public on science.

I sought out this book due to a personal fascination with the function of muscles in the body as part of a larger research project of mine into chronic health conditions, such as fibromyalgia and entrapped nerves, chronic fatigue syndrome, and the effects of the stress (AKA "fight-flight-freeze" response) on the muscles of the body, which in many cases leads to chronic pain. In the process, I became interested in the function of all muscles throughout the body.

I consider this book an outstanding permanent addition to my scientific reference library and recommend it unreservedly for that purpose to anyone interested in this topic. I have also read and reviewed Vogel's book on the circulatory system, Vital Circuits, and highly recommend it as well.

Kate McMurry

Well, this isn't a natural history of tools, but it equally well isn't a natural history of muscle. It's both. I came looking for something about muscle, both as a person who generally likes general interest math/science books and as a competitive masters sculler. I lost interest when the tools invaded this book, as I think there's much more to be said about muscle itself, although perhaps my level of interest is not really "general" in this particular case. I wonder if there wouldn't be a wider audience for this book if people understood how important the tools are in the content.

This was a gift for my husband who promptly buried his face in it, leaving it only to eat, sleep, and go to work for the next week. He's been a walking encyclopedia since then with regard to how muscle does the work it was intended for. I believe he even liked this one more than Vogel's "Cats' Paws and Catapults".

This is a very good book. It is interesting and written with the lay person in mind, yet, is able to present an overview of a very complex field of study. The first half is a synopsis of muscle and how it works. The second half describes how humans have put muscles to work in practical ways - how tools are designed to get the most out of how humans are built. Muscles: It may come as somewhat of a surprise that muscle physiology is so complex and is yet to be well understood by modern science. This makes our everyday understanding of muscles all the more important. Vogel's book is a good place to start in this quest, indeed, for a more complete review of muscle physiology, I think one would have to consult University level texts.

This book introduces a variety of topics related to muscles and the energetics of work including: comparative anatomy, physiology, basic mechanics of simple machines, history of machines that use muscles, etc. The style is engaging, lively, and clear. Many concepts, some of them complex, are described in a way that non-specialists can understand, although, occasionally, the reader may have to work a bit. It helps if you have some previous knowledge of physiology but it isn't absolutely necessary. If you would like to learn about insect muscles, Roman catapults, and row boats, buy this book.

_Prime Mover: A Natural History of Muscle_ by Steven Vogel is an ambitious work of both natural and human history. The author in this book showed how muscle worked (in general, not just in humans), how humans have used it, and how muscle and muscle-dependent (human and animal) activities, tools, and weapons have shaped world history, culture, and technology.

Understandably, the first section of the book detailed the structure and function of muscle, including how it is constructed down to the molecular level, how it is made to do work, how it is supplied with energy, how it was connected to the rest of the body, and the different types of muscles that exist. Comprising the first six of the book's fifteen chapters, it was an important part, covering not only a lot of biology but also a good deal of physics (indeed physics was quite important in later discussions of how muscle and muscle-dependent technology worked and affected human history).

The first section was very interesting and informative much of the time, covering for instance the differences between twitch muscle fibers and tonic muscle fibers (the former, lighter in color, are great for quick, sharp actions but fatigue easily, the latter darker, contracting more slowly, but able to resist fatigue a great deal better) and how the propriocoptive system works (one of the senses - not unlike seeing or hearing - that encompassed reflexes and quicker-than-thought reactions to such things as hot surfaces and is made up of muscles, tendons, and nerves). As with the rest of the book, this section was well illustrated. Vogel did a pretty good job overall in his coverage of the biology of muscle, keeping it for the most part comprehendible and engaging to the lay person, though I thought it got just a little too detailed and technical for me at times (and one or two parts of it frankly were quite hard to get through).

Most of the rest of the book dealt with a wide variety of tools, weapons, and activities, covering their history, why and how these items and activities developed, what muscles (human or animal as the case may be) were used as well as how they were used, and why they were (as occurred in most cases) eventually replaced with items not as dependent on muscular activity. This to me was the most interesting part of the book, with Vogel providing fascinating insights and perspectives on such items as screw drivers, hammers, axes (fascinating coverage of this topic, as the author discussed among other things how stone axes were used and the how the centers of percussion and gravity and thus the effectiveness of axes were altered by where an ax handle and ax head met, how they were attached, and the materials used in both head and ax), cranks, paddled and rowed ships (the reader learns the advantages and disadvantages of both and why ships that could be both sailed and rowed - as were Viking ships and the galley ships in the Mediterranean- faced unique problems; sailing ships must be ballasted to sail crosswind and that extra weight can complicate rowing and in addition sailing other than downwind generally made ships heel over, something avoided by ships having high sides, a solution that made oar placement problematic), bicycles, human-powered aircraft (a wonderful section), wheelbarrows (I think the reader will find we take for granted their simple but highly effective design), backpacks, monument construction (notably with regards to the Egyptian pyramids and Stonehenge), cutting down trees (the history of the crosscut saw was surprisingly interesting), plows, treadmills, (which were once used in prisons as a means of punishment), chariots, wagons, boomerangs, atlatls, slings, blowguns, crossbows, and trebuchets (the last several items requiring a fair amount of physics).

In addition to an in depth and interesting discussion of the evolution of animal-powered tools and vehicles, Vogel covered at length why certain animals were domesticated and their relative advantages and disadvantages. The historical rivalry between those who favored horses and those who favored oxen merited its own interesting chapter. Overall the coverage of these animals and others dovetailed nicely with discussion on the domestication of animals in Jared Diamond's excellent _Guns, Germs, and Steel_.

The final section dealt with muscle as food, covering what role muscle as food has played in human evolution and in recorded history and what are the advantages and disadvantages of diets rich in muscle and muscle-free. There was even a small section covering human cannibalism, with the author demonstrating that while survival cannibalism and ritual cannibalism certainly existed, it is just not possible for routine nutritional cannibalism to have been at the very least effective and generally even possible at all.

Overall _Prime Mover_ was an interesting book and one that I am glad that I read, good as both a work of human history and natural history.