Book review of Walking: One Step At a Time by Erling Kagge, 2019

Drawing from his rich life experiences, the author’s musings are poetic and profound  As writing, this is worth reading. But as a book, this is woefully lacking.

This really should have been a long magazine article, one worthy of National Geographic or The Atlantic or Harper’s. Instead a lot of fluff fills the void of this pocketsize book of only 180 pages. Fluff in the irrelevant or useless full-page photographs, illustrations, diagrams, and graphs. More fluff in the extra wide margins around all four edges of each page. Still more fluff in chapters that randomly conclude with a few lines of text at the top of an otherwise empty page. The author is a world-renowned explorer of all three Poles: the North Pole, the South Pole, and Mt Everest. Perhaps at times he had suffered snow blindness, which may have been contagious and so afflicted the book designer.

Fluff abounds also in the writing that too often wanders from the subject of walking. But the majority of the writing that indeed pertains to walking is stellar. Kudos to the translator who succeeded admirably in providing us with text that does not seem translated. The author’s musings about walking are inspired of course by his treks to the three Poles, but also by his hikes on the streets and in the sewers of Manhattan, by his correspondence and conversations with Nobel Laureates and poets and professors, and by his daughter’s first steps and his grandfather’s death march to the gallows. Drawing from such rich experiences, his musings are often poetic and profound. So if you forget the book design fluff, you are sure to value this book.