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"Grafting physical science with smooth, amiable storytelling, Tsui's study creates a fun and fact-filled physiology lesson for readers of any knowledge level...An easily digestible, reliably entertaining appreciation of muscle, 'the vivid engine of our lives.' " -- Kirkus

"Bonnie Tsui's multifaceted celebration of muscles is an appealing, enlightening guide to understanding and appreciating our own strength." -- BookPage, starred review

A unique big-idea book not just about what muscles are but also what muscles mean. Tsui looks at muscles from the perspective of strength, form, action, flexibility, and endurance; she explores how muscles have defined beauty and how they have distorted it throughout history, how they power all our movements and play an essential role in keeping us healthy.
 
In On Muscle, Bonnie Tsui brings her signature blend of science, culture, immersive reporting, and personal narrative to examine not just what muscles are but what they mean to us. Cardiac, smooth, skeletal—these three different types of muscle in our bodies make our hearts beat; push food through our intestines, blood through our vessels, babies out the uterus; attach to our bones and allow for motion. Tsui also traces how muscles have defined beauty—and how they have distorted it—through the ages, and how they play an essential role in our physical and mental health.
 
Tsui introduces us to the first female weightlifter to pick up the famed Scottish Dinnie Stones, then takes us on a 50-mile run through the Nevada desert that follows the path of escape from a Native boarding school—and gives the concept of endurance new meaning. She travels to Oslo, where cutting-edge research reveals how muscles help us bounce back after injury and illness, an important aspect of longevity. She jumps into the action with a historic Double Dutch club in Washington, D.C., to explain anew what Charles Darwin meant by the brain-body connection. Woven throughout are stories of Tsui’s childhood with her Chinese immigrant artist dad—a black belt in karate—who schools her from a young age in a kind of quirky, in-house Muscle Academy. 
 
On Muscle shows us the poetry in the physical, and the surprising ways muscle can reveal what we’re capable of.
 
 
Bonnie Tsui is a longtime contributor to The New York Times and the bestselling author of Why We Swim, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and a Time magazine and NPR Best Book of the Year; it is currently being translated into ten languages. Tsui is also the author of American Chinatown, which won the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, and Sarah and the Big Wave, a children’s book about the first woman to surf Mavericks and a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard selection. Her work has been recognized and supported by Harvard University, the National Press Foundation, the Mesa Refuge, and the Best American Essays series. She lives, swims, and surfs in the Bay Area, and her website is bonnietsui.com.