Any adult who is eager to tackle a challenging new pursuit but just can't turn off the mental chatter about old dogs and new tricks might consider picking up a copy of Tom Vanderbilt's Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning. Accessible and highly informative, the book is a fast-paced exploration of the science of skill acquisition and a delightful account of journalist Vanderbilt's personal adventures among fellow new learners.
Inspired by his daughter's decision to enter the world of competitive chess, on the cusp of his 50s Vanderbilt (You May Also Like) set out to acquire five new skills: singing, surfing, drawing, making (a wedding ring to replace one of the two he lost while surfing) and juggling. From his Brooklyn home, he had ready access to capable teachers, and he makes generous use of their patient instruction, instead of turning to the estimated 135 million instructional videos available on YouTube. To set the stage for the account of his journeys up these learning curves, he also draws upon the work of a wide range of helpful professionals in fields that include neuroscience, child development and something called movement science, who offer insights into the process of human learning.
Vanderbilt's efforts are dogged, even as, he recognizes, they fall far short of mastery. The most interesting chapter is the one on surfing. It begins on a chilly November day at a beach in the Rockaways, N.Y., and culminates in a trip to a surfing school in Costa Rica, where his classmates award him the nickname "Gumby" to describe his unique posture. Most emotionally satisfying is the story of his stint with the BritPop Choir, a Lower East Side group of 50 amateur singers that functioned for him as a "small-scale model of what a vitally functioning participatory democracy looks like." His 10 weeks of training with the group end with a concert, the first time he had sung onstage since third grade.
The message of Vanderbilt's book--one he says is not a " 'how to do book' as much as a 'why to do' book"--is relentlessly positive, reminding readers that it's "never too late to be a beginner." Summing up his efforts, he writes: "I achieved modest competency on a number of things to which I'd long been attracted, from the outside. But doing these things brought me an immense and almost forgotten kind of pleasure." Despite the inevitable setbacks, his is an empowering story that will have adventuresome readers eager to head off in search of some new challenge the moment they've put it down. --Harvey Freedenberg, freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: An engaging perspective on the joys of embarking on the process of learning something new.