The New York Times Book Review’s advice and miscellaneous best-seller list — the place where self-help books go to eyeball one another — is a boisterous rolling carnival of hustlers and hacks and optimists and jokers, with the occasional naked lady, tent preacher, dog trainer or television chef thrown in for good measure. Serious books do appear there, but they’re like guests who’ve wandered into the wrong party.
Among the writers who’ve appeared on that list, Timothy Ferriss — author of “The 4-Hour Workweek” (2007) and now “The 4-Hour Body” — is an unusually beguiling humanlike specimen. He’s a graduate of the prep school St. Paul’s and has a degree in East Asian studies from Princeton University. He is also a Guinness Book of World Records record holder for most consecutive tango spins in one minute, a feat he accomplished with a partner on “Live With Regis and Kelly.”
What else is worth knowing about Mr. Ferriss? After college he founded — and later sold — BrainQuicken, a Web company that sells nutritional supplements. He’s a so-called angel investor in Internet companies. He’s spoken at one of those futuristic, cerebral TED conferences. He pals around with Silicon Valley C.E.O.’s. Wired magazine crowned him, in 2008, the “greatest self-promoter in the world.” He is said to be very good at Chinese kickboxing.
If a movie were to be made of Mr. Ferriss’s life, it would star Matthew McConaughey in little rectangular eyeglasses. Mr. Ferriss likes to pose without a shirt — in some photographs he sprouts chest hair; in others, it’s been waxed away — and to describe the veins that run across his abdomen. He tosses around words like “thrashing” and, to refer to inanimate things, “bad boys.” His new book opens at an outdoor Nine Inch Nails concert.
He can use without irony, as he does in “The 4-Hour Body,” lines like: “I was enjoying French food and a bottle of Bordeaux with a 25-year-old female yoga instructor new to San Francisco, fresh from the Midwest.” This poor woman lets slip that she’s unable to have an orgasm. Mr. Ferriss, as any humanitarian would, makes it a point to fix this problem for her. “I was able to facilitate orgasms,” he writes, “in every woman who acted as a test subject.”
Everything about Mr. Ferriss’s book declares: This is not your auntie’s self-help book. No muffled “I’m OK — You’re OK” tone here. The vibe is: I’m Superbad, bro, and I have dimples. You’re a mole person who, if you become an angel investor in my books, might someday touch the hem of my Speedo.
In his previous book, “The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich” (his subtitles are awesome), which was on the hardcover advice best-seller list for more than 75 weeks, he delivered tips like (I’m exaggerating only slightly): hire an overseas virtual assistant for a few bucks an hour and use the extra time to ski in the Andes.
His new one, “The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman,” made its debut at No. 1 on the hard-cover advice list on Jan. 2. It’s among the craziest, most breathless things I’ve ever read, and I’ve read Klaus Kinski, Dan Brown and Snooki.
Mr. Ferriss offers advice about so many disparate things — not simply losing weight and building muscle and improving sex and living forever, but learning to hold your breath longer than Houdini (!) and hit baseballs like Babe Ruth (!!) — that paging through “The 4-Hour Body” is like reading the sprawling menu in a dubious diner, quite certain the only thing you’d dare order is the turkey club.
Here’s a better analogy: “The 4-Hour Body” reads as if The New England Journal of Medicine had been hijacked by the editors of the SkyMall catalog. Some of this junk might actually work, but you’re going to be embarrassed doing it or admitting to your friends that you’re trying it. This is a man who, after all, weighs his own feces, likes bloodletting as a life-extension strategy and aims a Philips goLite at his body in place of ingesting caffeine.
As befits the former chief executive of a nutritional supplements company, Mr. Ferriss talks up a witches’ brew of juices, nuts, potions and drugs. Here’s a typical burp from an early chapter: “Overfat? Try timed protein and pre-meal lemon juice. Undermuscled? Try ginger and sauerkraut. Can’t sleep? Try upping your saturated fat or using cold exposure.”
Want to have “wolverine” sex? Who doesn’t? Eat 4 Brazil nuts, 20 raw almonds and 2 capsules of fermented cod-liver oil and butterfat four hours before intercourse. Mr. Ferriss used a hormone-slash-drug called human chorionic gonadotropin and more than tripled his semen volume. “Happy days,” he writes.
Mr. Ferriss makes difficult things seem very easy. But that line from the old Tom Waits song applies here: “The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away.” Mr. Ferriss, for example, makes a big deal about how, on his diet, you’re encouraged to go wild one day a week, eating whatever garbage makes you happy. “Welcome to Utopia,” he says. Everybody ready to dig in?
His advice for pulling this off mentions that diarrhea, unless one is careful, may result. One must consume grapefruit juice before the day’s second meal. One needs to ingest layers of supplements to increase insulin sensitivity. He drinks cooled yerba mate tea during his pig-out meals and likes a greens supplement. Best of all, he instructs one to “engage in brief muscular contraction throughout the binge.”
To paraphrase Dean Wormer lecturing the pledge Flounder in “Animal House”: “Fat, twitchy and stupid is no way to go through life, son.”
I’ll give Mr. Ferriss this: He is never boring. He’s always, on every page, as eager as a puppy going for a morning walk. He verges on being pretty funny. John Updike never described an intimate part of a woman’s anatomy as resembling “an Imperial Guard from Star Wars.” Dr. Ruth never followed a sex tip with a warning like, “Build a strong neck so she doesn’t pop your head off.”
How can Mr. Ferriss get away with touting so many practices that are outside medicine’s mainstream? He seems to think of himself as a kind of Twitter-era Johnny Appleseed or Hans and Franz, wandering the planet, pumping you up, making orgasms sweeter and abs six-packier. He quotes one doctor who says to him, “You — Tim Ferriss — can do more outside the system than inside it.”
He also writes, “I have no prestige to lose.”
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