Books

Item Description

Uncensored: My Life and Uncomfortable Conversations at the Intersection of Black and White America and Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance are both selections from the Next Big Idea Club.

Uncensored: My Life and Uncomfortable Conversations at the Intersection of Black and White America

Drawing upon his own powerful personal story, Zachary Wood shares his perspective on free speech, race, and dissenting opinions--in a world that sorely needs to learn to listen.

As the former president of the student group Uncomfortable Learning at his alma mater, Williams College, Zachary Wood knows from experience about intellectual controversy. At school and beyond, there's no one Zach refuses to engage with simply because he disagrees with their beliefs--sometimes vehemently so--and this view has given him a unique platform in the media.

But Zach has never shared the details of his own personal story. In Uncensored, he reveals for the first time how he grew up poor and black in Washington, DC, where the only way to survive was resisting the urge to write people off because of their backgrounds and perspectives. By sharing his troubled upbringing--from a difficult early childhood to the struggles of code-switching between his home and his elite private school--Zach makes a compelling argument for a new way of interacting with others and presents a new outlook on society's most difficult conversations.

Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance

The capacity to endure is the key trait that underlies great performance in virtually every field—from a 100-meter sprint to a 100-mile ultramarathon, from summiting Everest to acing final exams or completing any difficult project. But what if we all can go farther, push harder, and achieve more than we think we’re capable of?

Blending cutting-edge science and gripping storytelling in the spirit of Malcolm Gladwell—who contributes the book’s foreword—award-winning journalist Alex Hutchinson reveals that a wave of paradigm-altering research over the past decade suggests the seemingly physical barriers you encounter are set as much by your brain as by your body. This means the mind is the new frontier of endurance—and that the horizons of performance are much more elastic than we once thought. 

But, of course, it’s not “all in your head.” For each of the physical limits that Hutchinson explores—pain, muscle, oxygen, heat, thirst, fuel—he carefully disentangles the delicate interplay of mind and body by telling the riveting stories of men and women who’ve pushed their own ultimate limits in extraordinary ways.

The longtime “Sweat Science” columnist for Outside and Runner’s World, Hutchinson, a former national-team long-distance runner and Cambridge-trained physicist, was one of only two reporters granted access to Nike’s top-secret training project to break the two-hour marathon barrier, an extreme quest he traces throughout the book. But the lessons he draws from shadowing elite athletes and from traveling to high-tech labs around the world are surprisingly universal. Endurance, Hutchinson writes, is “the struggle to continue against a mounting desire to stop”—and we’re always capable of pushing a little farther.