Image

Credit...The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA, via Art Resource, NY

By Molly Young

Dear readers,

If the retail price of a book were pegged to the number of high-quality ideas it contained, the two books below would sell for downright goofy sums. And by the same logic, a book that contained zero ideas or — worse — lazy or unsupported ones would owe the reader money for squandered time. This is my platform. Vote Molly for president.

—Molly

“The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity,”by Anson Rabinbach

Nonfiction, 1990

Image

Why did Red Bull sell 12.7 billion cans of energy drink last year? Why is it a common and accepted practice to track one’s daily steps? Why did a German chemist named Wilhelm Weichardt attempt to invent a vaccine for fatigue in the early 20th century and — crucially — if he was successful, where can we present our upper arms for immediate injection?

These questions are answered in “The Human Motor,” if only implicitly as regards the first two. Rabinbach, who died recently at the age of 79, had loftier concerns than the state of Red Bull’s market share.