Sweat

I was riveted by Sweat and its extraordinary tale of the ups and downs of exercise over millennia. Who knew? – Jane Fonda

Perhaps because exercise is such a universal - and universally humbling - part of our lives, Sweat does, seemingly effortlessly, what all good history books should do: take the past and make it vastly more human

* The Times *

There’s a skip to Hayes’ step throughout, and the book will certainly ground any January health kick in a grander context

* Daily Mail *As a storyteller, Hayes is like Joe Frazier … I would have liked this book to go on longer. Erudite, ludic, eccentric, energetic and historically transporting, it’s like falling through a gym and landing in a joust – Zoe Williams * Guardian *Bill Hayes’ peripatetic inquiry into the history of exercise is a delight … You’re in for a treat. Hayes weaves his riveting findings in the archives with a revelatory memoir of physical exertion that begins to answer that most human of questions: what does the body mean? – Alison Bechdel, author of ‘The Secret to Superhuman Strength’Charming and idiosyncratic … A distinctive, often moving blend of historical and memoirist writing … Hayes’s exuberant book tells us what awaits if we can only make it so * NEW YORKER *

One of a number of titles that promise to take a serious look at exercise

* Financial Times, Books of the Year 2022 *

Charming and compelling … Among the pleasures of Sweat, Bill Hayes’s idiosyncratic and delightful history of exercise, is learning about the sweat lives of the great and good

* The Critic *Hayes fascinatingly traces exercise’s gradual evolution into the multibillion-pound industry it is now – by way of some genuine scientific breakthroughs and several passing crazes * Readers’ Digest *A lovely weave of memory and science, great characters and compassionate humor. You will love it for its wisdom and wonderful writing – Anne LamottLike the most rewarding kind of travel writer, Bill Hayes is both informative and personal as he takes us through the borderlands … I’m grateful for the way this intimate, reflective, and factual guidebook captures the feeling of that terrain – Robert PinskyPlayful and powerful … profoundly moving … Hayes writes with so much panache that reading this book is thrilling * Boston Globe *Bill Hayes has an unusual set of skills … He is part science writer, part memoirist, part culture explainer * New York Times *A beguiling brew of fascinating scientific facts and illuminating, poignant anecdotes … vital and pulsing with energy. * Entertainment Weekly *Exquisitely wrought, heartrending and joyous – Joyce Carol OatesLike Patti Smith’s haunting M Train, Hayes’ book weaves seemingly disparate threads of memory into a kind of sanctuary - a secret place where one can shake off the treasured relics of past lives and prepare to be reborn anew * San Francisco Chronicle *Hayes’s work is resoundingly about life - about being wide awake to possibility, to the beauty of every fleeting moment * Oprah.com *

Taking us through the different forms of exercise and their origins, Hayes gives a cultural, scientific and personal history of human movement

* Irish Independent, Books of the Year 2022 *All laud and honor to Hayes * Washington Post *He is, in his photos and writings, the great poet of the everyday – Edmund WhiteA sweeping inquiry into the sometimes converging, sometimes colliding worlds of psychology, medicine, mythology, aging, and mental health – Maria PopovaMemoir, history, and science come together and apart again in a book that reads very much like a dream, switching genre and subject with a beautiful logic of its own, illuminated now and then with flashes of gorgeous insight … Read this one and savour it * Out *If there is one person in the modern world who can reinvigorate Mercuriale’s enormous unfinished labor and bridge the physical, the philosophical, and the poetic - bridge Whitman and Warhol, Plato and Peloton, Kafka and Curie, Tennessee Williams and Serena Williams; bridge the “immediate bodily now” of exercise with “the wisdom of the past that had faded from living memory” - it is Bill Hayes. And so he does, in Sweat: A History of Exercise — an expedition, both existential and historical, spanning two thousand years and three continents – Maria Popova