by Michael Easter
This book was used for my current English 2 class (critical thinking and writing) and we've spent the semester having to spot fallacies, strengths, and weaknesses in Michael Easter's thesis that modern conveniences and technology have made us weak, mentally, physically, and emotionally. A resident of Las Vegas, it seems that Easter's focus is Western society and while I agree overall with his point, I had a few issues with how they were presented.
The main issue I had didn't have anything to do with an actual fallacy or factual issues (so I struggled with those assignments) as I did with the extreme (and therefore unrelatable to the average reader) experiences he cited. I totally agree with him that we were fitter and sharper when life was harder and took more effort (or any actual effort). But Easter uses a month-long trip to the Alaska wilderness, where he learns to survive in a harsh environment in the same manner as people did before there were any modern conveniences. He lives and sleeps in a tent, learns to track caribou, and eventually hunts one down to provide by that time in the trek very welcome substantial food.
Easter seems to have unlimited resources to travel to meet with experts. As a writer for Men's Health, I assume that they paid for a lot of his travel expenses. Sending him to Austin, Texas, to meet with a fitness coach he'd already interviewed online didn't seem like too much of a stretch. But at one point, Easter embarks on a trip to Bhutan to see how they live a more enlightened life. He describes the trip as "four flights across 48 hours, 14 time zones, and 9.465 miles" and while the chapter is fascinating, the more Easter and others he interviews who have similar extreme experiences, the less and less relatable it becomes as he fails to offer practical examples to his readers of how to improve the effect of modern conveniences in their everyday lives.
I do recommend this book if you are interested in some pretty fascinating stories that give you the opportunity to live vicariously through people who have the ability to manage experiences that most of us would never have the opportunity to experience. In a way, The Comfort Crisis isn't just a book to help you shed your dependency on modern tech, but also a vicarious travelogue.
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