What is Binnie Klein reading?

Today's featured contributor at Writers Read: Binnie Klein, author of Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind.

Her entry begins:

Nietzsche’s Angel Food Cake…And Other ‘Recipes’ For the Intellectually Famished by Rebecca Coffey (Beck and Branch Press, 2013)

Rebecca Coffey is a science journalist and humorist who sent me some audio versions of a few of the astounding “recipes” from her collection to play on my radio show at WPKN. From the very first recipe for Nietzsche’s Angel Food Cake, in which instructions include “Kill God. Set Him Aside” and “Ecstatically whip, as if possessed by a storm-wind of freedom, 1-1/2 teaspoons cream of tartar…” I was hooked. Coffey selects 22 cultural icons (among them Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, Anais Nin, Sigmund Freud, Harper Lee, John Steinbeck) and creates individual recipes for food based on their ideas and writings. From Ayn Rand’s “Head Cheese,” in which you must “stand naked at the edge of a granite cliff” as you assemble...[read on]

About Klein's book, Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind, from the publisher:

A provocative tale of an unlikely contender and her midlife transformation through boxing.

“I peered through the Venetian blinds in our den, with its view of the playground next door, and watched mournfully as the popular girls played softball. I wanted to run fast, hit hard, and wear a cute uniform. These girls seemed to know something about life that I didn’t.”

When Binnie Klein took up boxing in her midfifties, the reaction from friends and acquaintances was always the same: “You?” Why, after all, would a middle-aged Jewish psychotherapist with no previous history of athletics take up boxing? In Blows to the Head, Klein offers a provocative tale of an unlikely contender whose unexpected fascination with boxing takes her beyond the ring and leads her back to her roots and to a surprising chapter of the Jewish immigrant experience. With candor and wit, she reveals a series of memories and insights that would never have been possible if she hadn’t been drawn toward a pair of boxing gloves during a physical therapy session. In a story that will captivate and inspire women and men, athletes and nonathletes, Klein shows us that if we turn over the “weird stones” on our path, the ones we usually ignore, we may find ourselves on an unexpected journey that will summon vitality back into our lives.

Visit Binnie Klein's WPKN webpage, and learn more about Blows to the Head: How Boxing Changed My Mind.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Binnie Klein and Griffin.

Writers Read: Binnie Klein.

--Marshal Zeringue