A review by mostlyshanti
Sweat: A History of Exercise by Bill Hayes

informative relaxing medium-paced

3.0

Badly titled! It should be "a personal history of exercise". Heaps of interesting insight but it's also sort of a memir, and it ended up being an average memoir and an average history of exercise. Hayes is really let down by his focus on  Mercuriale, who he should have focused the whole book on. The only gesture towards a truly global history of exercise is a surface level look at yoga. No tai chi mention, ust as one example of the many, many notable omissions from other cultures ways of seeing exercise. He also overuses a tendency to show his work, rabbiting on and on about the libraries and the research, which is sort of interesting but not enough to justify the space it takes up. Instead, he should have been honest about his actual interests: he's a gay man who likes to exercise and became obsessed with a Renaissance Italian physician's documentation of exercise too. The fun facts about Jane Fonda didn't really need to be added in there (although I will say it was genius to get her to blurb the book - who pulled that string?)