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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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

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

A lovely weave of memory and science, great characters and compassionate humor. You will love it for its wisdom and wonderful writing

Like 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

Playful and powerful ... profoundly moving ... Hayes writes with so much panache that reading this book is thrilling

Bill Hayes has an unusual set of skills ... He is part science writer, part memoirist, part culture explainer

A beguiling brew of fascinating scientific facts and illuminating, poignant anecdotes ... vital and pulsing with energy.

Exquisitely wrought, heartrending and joyous

Like 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

Hayes's work is resoundingly about life - about being wide awake to possibility, to the beauty of every fleeting moment

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

All laud and honor to Hayes

He is, in his photos and writings, the great poet of the everyday

A sweeping inquiry into the sometimes converging, sometimes colliding worlds of psychology, medicine, mythology, aging, and mental health

Memoir, 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

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

Bill Hayes is the author of How We Live Now, Insomniac City, and The Anatomist, among other books. Hayes is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in nonfiction and is a frequent contributor to the New York Times. A collection of his street photography, How New York Breaks Your Heart, was published recently by Bloomsbury. Hayes has completed the screenplay for a film adaptation of Insomniac City, currently in the works from Brouhaha Entertainment, and he is also a co-editor of Oliver Sacks's posthumous books. He lives in New York. Visit his website at billhayes.com