Superhuman by Rowan Hooper

My review of Superhuman: Life at the Extremes of Mental and Physical Ability (Little, Brown) by Rowan Hooper appears in today’s Sunday Business Post Magazine. Here’s an excerpt:

Superhuman is another entry in the burgeoning genre of self-help books that draw their lessons from the social sciences. You know the kind of thing: discussions of MRI data, citations of recent papers, and some self-deprecating accounts of interviews with the relevant boffins.  

Hooper has one big thing going for him: his material is genuinely beguiling. Most of us, after all, don’t excel at anything in particular (most of us don’t get into Oxford at all, let alone in our mid-teens). It’s perennially interesting to ask: what distinguishes the excellent from the rest of us? Hooper – laudably methodical – sorts his high achievers into those who think. those who do, and those who are. In Part One, “Thinking,” he assembles case studies representing “intelligence, memory, language ability and focus.” Part Two, “Doing,” examines “bravery, singing, and endurance.” Part Three deals with “longevity, resilience, sleeping and happiness” – all areas in which people apparently excel (I’m pretty good at sleeping, myself, actually).