Volume 49, Number 19 · December 5, 2002
Nature & the Art of Running
By Elizabeth Marshall Thomas
Why We Run: A Natural History
by Bernd Heinrich
Ecco, 292 pp., $12.95 (paper)
Why We Run is so far from being an ordinary book on running that its scope and scientific excellence may be a disadvantage. The busy editor of at least one prestigious publication, under the impression that the book was a runner's how-to manual, gave it for review to a sportswriter. It was as if an editor of 1845 gave Voyage of the Beagle to a dog breeder. To be sure, the author, Bernd Heinrich, won the US National Championship 100-kilometer marathon, so he certainly is a runner, and, indeed, his book tells us something of how he achieved this surprising victory at the age of forty-one—how he, virtually unknown in the world of runners, bested some of the most famous runners of his day. But besides being a runner, Heinrich is also a biologist and an acute observer of the natural world. In Why We Run he has brought together these two fields of knowledge, and he is almost certainly the first to do so.
Review, 3133 words
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