Prime Mover: A natural history of muscle by Steven Vogel, W. W. Norton, $25.95, ISBN 0393021262
GREAT stuff, muscle. Without it, we鈥檇 be down among the sponges, having sand kicked in our faces by earthworms and ostriches and all the other animals whose ancestors, a billion years ago, signed up for the Charles Atlas course in evolution.
Steven Vogel, professor of biology at Duke University in North Carolina, reckons that muscle doesn鈥檛 get due credit because understanding its mechanism requires dialogue between many different biological disciplines, not to mention physicists and engineers.
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Prime Mover displays few disciplinary blinkers. After zipping through the natural history of muscle tissue in early chapters, Vogel turns to his real passion: how animals, and especially people, put muscle power to the most unlikely tasks, from flying to ploughing to opening beer cans.
If you want to know why bowsaws have M-shaped teeth, why human-powered flight is only barely possible and why cats don鈥檛 run marathons, you鈥檒l find it here.
The result is perfect holiday reading, with a revelation on every page about everything from church keys to triremes. I discovered why a clockwise screw thread is 鈥渞ight-handed鈥� and that a frog鈥檚 leg has the same percentage of fat as raw spinach. Guaranteed to fight mental flab.