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What it argues
Natural Born Heroes is Christopher McDougall's follow-up to Born to Run, and it attempts something equally ambitious: to argue that heroism is a trainable physical and psychological skill, and that the human body contains natural capacities for endurance, power, and resilience that modern life has systematically atrophied. McDougall organizes the book around one of the most audacious military operations of World War II — the kidnapping of a German general from occupied Crete by a small band of British Special Operations agents and Cretan resistance fighters — and uses it as a lens for examining what ordinary humans can do when trained correctly and motivated fully.
The central military story is genuinely gripping. Patrick Leigh Fermor, a young British adventurer with no formal military training, together with W. Stanley Moss and a handful of Cretan partisans, captured General Heinrich Kreipe on a mountain road and walked him across the mountains of Crete for weeks while the entire German garrison searched for them. McDougall researched the operation in depth and tells it with narrative verve. The historical story alone would make the book worth reading.
What it gets right
- 1.
Heroism, McDougall argues, is not a personality trait but a practiced skill — cultivated through physical hardship, communal belonging, and the development of practical capability.
- 2.
The Cretan resistance fighters who aided the German general's capture had no military training but possessed extraordinary endurance, local knowledge, and willingness to act under threat.
- 3.
Natural movement philosophy, as expressed through parkour and similar disciplines, holds that the human body evolved for varied, creative, whole-body movement and that modern training methods isolate muscles in ways that reduce functional capacity.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Christopher McDougall is an American journalist and author based in Pennsylvania. He was a war correspondent for the Associated Press before turning to long-form writing. His first book, Born to Run, published in 2009, became an international bestseller and is credited with sparking widespread interest in barefoot and minimalist running. Natural Born Heroes, published in 2015, extends his investigation into human physical capacity through the lens of World War II history and natural movement philosophy. He trains regularly and has continued writing and speaking about human performance.
