Natural Born Heroes

Pursuit—walk, run, crawl. Escape—climb, balance, jump, swim. Attack—throw, lift, fight.

Wing Chun Kung Fu: Traditional Chinese Kung Fu for Self-Defense and Health, by Grandmaster Ip Chun, with Michael Tse. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1998.

How to Be a Spy: The World War II SOE Training Manual. Toronto: Dundurn Group, 2001. This is the actual training syllabus and method guidelines developed by Fairbairn and Sykes and other instructors for use by wartime SOE agents.

Becoming Batman: The Possibility of a Superhero.

The classics were their comic books; they’d grown up on Plutarch’s Lives—“the bible for heroes,” as Emerson declared—and came of age with their heads buried in the adventures of Odysseus and Richard the Lionheart and Sigurd the Dragonslayer. They understood that in ancient Greece, entire wars could pivot on the performance of one or two extraordina

Get Tough! How to Win in Hand-to-Hand Fighting, as Taught to the British Commandos, and the U.S. Armed Forces, by W. E. Fairbairn. Boulder, Colorado: Paladin Press, 1974.

Slow Burn, by Stu Mittleman. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.

Training for Endurance, by Phil Maffetone. Stamford, New York: David Barmore Productions, 1996. In Fitness and In Health, Phil Maffetone. Stamford, New York: David Barmore Productions, 1997. Cheng Hsin: the Principles of Effortless Power, by Peter Ralston. Berkeley: Blue Snake Books, 1989. Why We Get Fat: And What to Do About It, by Gary Taubes. Ne

We’re hardwired by nature to find common social ground, to believe that whatever we’re doing today is normal and not much different from the way people have always behaved.