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There is a certain amount of unhealthy balance and toxicity that these ultra-high performance environments and scenarios create for people. There will always be making enormous sacrifices of everything from long term health, relationship with friends and family, et cetera to make sure you get one of the handful of spots in the world every 2-4 years. Reading about how strenuous those environments were, even with supportive minded coaches can make me a bit tense. What is discussed here is the incredibly toxic, rules skirting if not outright breaking, psychological abuse, and even sexual assault on athletes by people in power at the Nike Oregon Program.

There is more to this book than just that. The author and her co-writer wove a very conversational/blogpost style covering everything from early childhood through to personal experiences well past her time in the Oregon program. It was a very open discussion about her personal highs and lows throughout her entire life up to that point. You really get into the mind of an Olympic athlete. It is a shame that so much of it documents truly horrific behavior by Nike staff at the behest of program director/trainer Alberto Salazar and people he brought into the program.

This book has a very niche target market. You have to love and care about computer history that surrounds the workstation market of the 1980/1990ss and the rise and fall of NeXT in that milieu. Not only that but you have to care specifically about the minutia around the sales and business side of that world rather than the tech side of that world. I'm in that target demographic. So the contents of the book work for me a lot. However by the author's own admission this book is largely compiled from contemporaneous notes he took at the time. It therefore feels like, and essentially is, a personal journal that got turned into a series of blog posts, that then got compiled into a one book volume. It reads and flows exactly like that, especially the first part. This could have used a good editor to polish it up quite a bit.

Since the author was high up in the sales organization and was sucked in by Steve Jobs there is more than a good bit of apologia about those subjects. It is ironic because the stories he tells about Jobs in action are not flattering but it never gets him over the hump of hero worship around him. His diagnosis of the failure at NeXT isn't wrong as much as incomplete. The way NeXT could have potentially saved himself I think is staring right in his face but he doesn't see it even in hindsight. I could/should write a blog post on that since it is out of scope for a book review.

On content if you are interested in this niche I'd give it five stars. But you really have to care about the business/sales side of NeXT and selling in the workstation market of the 1980s/1990s. The lack of good editing dings it a couple stars but it isn't so bad as to be insurmountable to power through.

I read this nearly 20 year old book after Peter Attia's recent longevity book as comparison. The premise is that using all of the latest knowledge on how to live healthily longer and the ever increasing life expectancy every year we could eventually live forever. Literally. Kerzweil had fantastical (pun intended) projections for when technologies would be here for life extension. He projected that by the 2020s (today) we were expected to have nanobots replacing blood cells and other bodily functions, a whole parallel bionic digestive system so we could eat whatever we wanted while the nanobots would be building out our real nutrition. Their precursors were going to be drugs that achieve comparably fantastical things a decade or two before.

Beyond their fantastical technology projections they bought into a lot of the craze that still dominates alt-health world with radical exaggerations of the negative effects of artificial sweeteners, coffee, EM radiation. While simultaneously they were really big on the exaggerated health claims of alkaline water and radical over-supplementation. The latter leads to suggested regiments that they follow of taking literally 90-250 pills a day. No thank you.

The core that is good is their diet, physical exercise, stress management, sleep, and cognitive exercises. It was pretty run of the mill advice you would get from any major mainstream place. That doesn't sell though hence all of the above stuff which is at best unnecessary to at worst ludicrous or maybe even dangerous if done impromperly.

It was an interesting snapshot in time but the juice really isn't worth the squeeze. You can find the real actionable information anywhere.

Overall the book presents broad stroke information on longevity that looks at the usual areas: exercise, diet, sleep, and how to be proactive with health. He contrasts this "Medicine 3.0" approach with the existing "Medicine 2.0" approach. Overall the suggestions are solid and mostly align with standard medical advice. His exercise level suggestions are far more than what is usually recommended or shown to be effective in studies but he has rationale for it which makes sense and may pan out over the long term but there is no study data to confirm it. Nothing he suggests is outside the realm of safety.

The food discussion is a bit more problematic. Again the core is good bones however I think prior his Paleo/Keto bent shows here. He looks at it mostly through the carb/fat/protein macros lense. The way he presents it you would not be wrong to conclude that you pretty much must eat a lot of animal protein to stay healthy and the plant side of the equation is kind of moot. No epidimiological data holds this up. All of it shows that a plant dominant diet is a key part of long term health and longevity. Even the handful of studies that show that people who ate meat had better outcomes than vegetarians and vegans, the meat level consumed is way less than one serving a day (usually in the 2-3 ounces/60-90 grams level). While he has no problem telling people to just suck it up on exercise and sleep fronts on this front he minimizes this by essentially saying "eat a lot of meat three times a day" follow up with minimizing negative longevity effects of that advice with "just take a statin" and "not everyone's lipid profile is adversely affected by eating a lot of saturated fat". This is probably the weakest part of the book.

I was expecting more actionable information as well. This is more like a primer with a pitch for "Medicine 3.0" which is going to specialists for all these special tests, interactions, etc. I personally do do all those things but I have to pay a lot out of pocket for that. Would it be great if all of this was covered by standard medical insurance? Absolutely. It isn't. There are plenty of things that those that can't afford that sort of treatment could be doing, and most of it is following standard guidelines put out by government health organizations. Laying that out could have been helpful to readers who can't spend thousands of dollars a year out of pocket on these things.

Overall I learned almost nothing new in this book because I follow these topics intensely already. For someone who has never heard of these things it could be a helpful primer but I have concerns about people coming away with misimpressions on the diet side of things and perhaps even fatalism about the approachability of these things if "Medicine 3.0" is out of financial range for them.

There are definitely good nuggets within this book. Some of the writing tends to drag things out with overly repetitive explorations of a one word topic. I get that from the perspective of how deceptively complex some things can be. However in many places it feels like the scripture reading in the Holy Hand Grenade scene in Monty Python's Holy Grail. There is no new depth added either directly, or even indirectly because something is being described again from a different perspective. It just feels like extra word count.

If you are reading this in passing it is a quick read. If you are reading this trying to meditate on the concepts then it is best to take it one chapter at a time and explore those concepts of each chapter in isolation. It will still be a quick read in terms of time that eyes are on pages but internalizing the information takes longer. I think both ways of reading it would be equally valid.

To say that this is an in-depth book would be an understatement. It is certainly more focused on the people involved than the technology itself. There are no schematics, detailed design information, etc. However the depth that is gone into with respect to the various engineers, cosmonauts, administrators, etc. is profound. In the case of the Soyuz 11 mission to Salyut, the first real mission to the first Salyut, there is even a day by day breakdown complete with personal diary entries from the three cosmonauts. I found the flow to be a bit difficult to get into until hitting the missions but by the time we get to the Soyuz 10/11 part and beyond there is plenty of drama to carry the story through under its own momentum. This is not a book for someone with a passing interest in the topic though. It is dense, dry, and thorough. It is more than just a look at the program itself. For major people you get their entire history through childhood, personal, life, and even a "where are they now" at the end of the book (or at least what their personal lives looked like after they left the space program).

If you are half paying attention then you know the broad strokes of the book. If you are really paying attention the way the billionaires and the mega-corporations work the political and economic system mostly to their benefit and everyone else's detriment won't be unfamiliar either. It is infuriating when it is laid out in such a concentrated manner. The last third of the book being about a positive future vision to break out of the modern dystopia and the places it is going at the hands of these people is why I bumped it up from 3-4 stars to 5. Just crying in your cornflakes loses its cathartic value quickly. Identifying relatively small steps to start addressing, but by no means completely reversing, the dysfunctional status quo is more uplifting. Calling out the false dichotomies like "do as the billionaires say or you are a Luddite or anti-business" is also more uplifting as well. There is no magic wand to fix all this "easily", especially with the resistance the billionaires always have towards the masses earning more power and influence but there are things we can do to reverse these trends for the betterment of everyone.