Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection by A.J. Jacobs

If you are thinking about putting "get healthy" on your list of New Year's Resolutions, you couldn't go wrong with a little guidance from A.J. Jacobs. And the laughter generated from his experiences will certainly burn off a couple of calories. 

Mr. Jacobs spent two years trying out a plethora of foods, advice, exercises, trends, tests, quackeries, and contraptions in his search for the perfect health regimen. The result of his efforts is the entertaining and enlightening book Drop Dead Healthy: One Man's Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection (2012).

He begins his quest with a bit of research and puts together a 53-page list of things to do to improve his health. Items range from eating leafy vegetables to humming (prevents sinus infections). He assembles a board of medical advisers and athletic trainers. He even seeks guidance from his hippie Aunt Marti and his 94-year-old grandfather (who just might know something about longevity).

He spends a month focusing on one area of his body - stomach, ears, heart, hands, immune system and so on for 26 chapters. 

His escapades include:

**Experimenting with shoeless running.

**Going all caveman with the paleo diet.

**Controlling portions by eating off his son's nine-inch plastic dinosaur plate.

**Taking a pole dancing class. (He wasn't surprised to be the only male.)

**Having a good result slathering Retin-A on his wrinkles. But, he puts the tube back in the closet because he read it makes skin more likely to get sunburned (not healthy), and as he writes, "it's a money vacuum."

**Trying to sleep using a CPAP machine which makes him feel "like a golden retriever with my head stuck out of a car window."

As in the other of Mr. Jacobs's books that I have read - The Know-It-All in which he reads the entire Encyclopedia Britannica and The Year of Living Biblically in which he incorporates all sorts of obscure rules from the Bible into his daily life - he combines laugh-out-loud scenarios with scientific research and a hefty dose of skepticism.

I love Mr. Jacobs's breezy, down-to-earth writing style. He is never afraid to appear a bit foolish - the photos in the book are just darn funny showcasing his "python-that-swallowed-a-goat type of body" and the many gizmos he wrestled with during his quest.

Even if you are not ready to begin a health regimen of eating stones and seaweed for dinner, don't worry, Mr. Jacobs has done that for you.  You are free to snack on Snickers as you read of his adventures. Enjoy.

The Five Foot Shelf

Fifty-one volumes: Harvard Classics

In a turn of conversation with The Professor the other day, the Harvard Classics were touched upon. I did a bit of sleuthing about that venerable series and found that the 51-volume anthology of classic works was originally published by Colliers in 1909.

It was known as Dr. Eliot's Five Foot Shelf, as Charles W. Eliot, then president of Harvard, was the unwitting instigator of the project claiming that, according to Wikipedia,  "the elements of a good liberal education could be obtained by spending 15 minutes a day reading from a collection of books that could fit on a five-foot shelf."

There is everything here from autobiography to Greek drama to essays to fiction and poetry. A fine education indeed.

Today, one can actually access the writings online at Project Gutenberg (here) although that would not be quite as satisfying as sitting down with the actual books and browsing through them reading a bit here and there. 

I also discovered that Christopher Beha wrote an account of a year spent reading all 51 volumes in The Whole Five Feet: What the Great Books Taught Me About Life, Death, and Pretty Much Everything Else (2009). It is now on my TBR list.

That project reminds me of the wonderfully funny book The Know-It-All: One Man's Humble Quest to Become the Smartest Person in the World by A.J. Jacobs about his year spent reading the Encyclopedia Britannica from A to Z.

I don't have the Harvard Classics but I feel as if someone, somewhere in my family did. I do have an incomplete set of Collier's Junior Classics: The Young Folks' Shelf of Books from 1912 that I will write about another time. Book One contains an introduction to the anthology by Dr. "Five-Foot Shelf" Eliot himself.

One can buy sets of the Harvard Classics online and I have seen them at used books stores. Or you might be lucky and find a set at a yard sale or estate sale. Or perhaps you already own your own Five Foot Shelf. If so, I would like to hear about it. How many of the volumes have you read?