100 Books Like The Warmth of the Heart Prevents Your Body from Rusting

An absolute denominator of life is resistance. Nietzsche had it right: adversity helps so long as it doesn’t do us in, and we make the biggest changes in our life when life pushes back. That applies to longevity too; the kites that stay longest in the air are pinned there by resistance. John Jerome gets this. This isn’t a book about longevity, it’s a book about running – slight but wise, with a kind of shopcraft-as-soulcraft turn of mind, if you think of your own body as the machine in the shop. Really, the book is a defense of stretching, in every sense of the word. You have to make periodic jaunts to “edge city,” where you eat the beans of just-manageable difficulty.

Takeaway sentence: “Heroism is endurance for one moment longer.”

Because the 21st century belongs to friendships. And camaraderie is the number 1 ingredient in the longevity recipe. We need each other. We need mutual assistance if we want to live not just longer but better. (What’s the saying? “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”) It’s easy to forget that in the tech age, which promotes ferocious independence (which ultimately isn’t much fun). Think of Durkheim’s notion of “collective effervescence”—which we missed big-time during Covid lockdown – and you’ll appreciate what Michael Austin, a philosopher from the University of Eastern Kentucky, is offering here. This is a philosophy with a healthy heart in every sense.

The retired Harvard psychiatrist shepherded the Grant Study of American men, one of the most robust longitudinal studies of humans ever done – basically examining the question: Why do some people live long and thrive? Here’s the science that confirms what everybody suspected, and I won’t tell you the answer but I think you can guess.

Vaillant is actually a pretty good writer too —which maybe isn’t surprising; literary chops are bred in the bone. George’s son, John Vaillant, is the mightly talented author of The Golden Spruce, among other books.

What really fascinates me about Haruki Murakami is not his body of work per se, but the process through which he rose from anonymity and became a world-renowned author. Until he was 29, he’d never imagined he had the talent to write a novel. Before his rise to fame, novelists were known to live a wild and intemperate existence, drinking lots of alcohol into the wee hours and getting started on their manuscript past deadline. Murakami, however, broke this stereotype as someone who wakes up early, works out every day, and has run multiple full marathons. I have no doubt it was the power of his habits that made him a world-famous author. He even says his motto is to turn himself into “a creature of habits.”

Intimate Death stands out through its spare and poetic language, its astute observation of the experiences of illness and dying, and matters of human dignity. Marie de Hennezel is a French psychologist. With great compassion and sensitivity, she shares her conversations with patients. She tells of life's unfinished business and how she learned to attend to it. Her writing is beautiful and transformative. It will touch your heart and change how you will view death.

Another book I would like to mention is Henri Nouwen’s Our Greatest Gifts: A Meditation on Dying and Caring. Nouwen is a Catholic priest and spiritual writer. Like de Hennezel, he touches the reader through his poetic and direct style.

The go-to book about voluntary homelessness, I always appreciate George Orwell’s amazing writing. It’s hard to put down.

The first half is about his time as a lowly kitchen assistant in the basement of a Parisian restaurant in the 1930s. The brutal divide between the rich and the destitute is better depicted here than in anything else I’ve ever read. The second half describes his time back in England and provides a heart-rending understanding of why homeless people are referred to as tramps and the ultimate emptiness of church-organized aid.

Although Orwell always had the option to opt out, his study of the lived experience of homelessness and the skill with which he captured it afterwards stand out as a colossus of the genre.

Like Anderson, Gertrude Stein had a sense of humor about gay Paree. Who else would write someone else’s autobiography?

I love her tone of detached amusement when describing the artistic titans of the Lost Generation. If you don’t get it, try the recipe for Alice B. Toklas brownies. 

I felt my net worth increase 25% just from reading this book, for Ian Fleming lavishes his world of French casinos and international crime in such opulence that you can feel the velvet smoking jacket slip over your shoulders with each turn of the page.

The debut of super-spy extraordinaire James Bond is so far removed from the celluloid pandemonium we all know and love that one would be forgiven for thinking MI6 veteran and fellow writer John le Carré was the real man behind the typewriter.

Fleming’s Bond is a cold, calculating career agent but also a human being, one with genuine weaknesses and failings that spoil the otherwise glamorous countenance of his operation but which also make the victories that much sweeter. Nobody does it better!

This collection of articles offers an intriguing approach to the topic of women, power, and sex by focusing on the many uses of Marie Antoinette. The essays, by prominent historians, art historians, and literary scholars, examine Marie Antoinette as a “site of history” where political and cultural contests occurred. The authors analyze pamphlets, archival materials, portraits, French Revolutionary pornography, and modern films to consider the central questions Marie Antoinette raised about her identity as a foreign queen, woman, wife, mother, and political figure.

She embodied the contradictions in old regime politics, culture, and gender identity and has been used subsequently to address political and gender issues to the present. Each essay offers a distinct, intriguing perspective on the reciprocal influence of this queen and the history of France. The collection reveals the wealth of purposes this queen served and the rich variety of interpretations she provoked.

The 1855 Classification created quality tiers for wines from a number of districts in Bordeaux: the famous First Growth (Premier Cru) wines and their Second, Third, Fourth, and Fifth Growth counterparts. There’s been only one change since then (a Second Growth promoted to First) and people still pay high prices for these wines based on a ranking that is more than 150 years old. Dewey Markham’s book tells the story of the Classification and shows that the wines that topped the list in 1855 were also ranked highest in earlier lists and that the rankings were based on price rather than intrinsic quality. It’s a well-documented book that brings history to bear on the way we look at some of the most prestigious wines of Bordeaux.