Boom! This is Books & Biceps #374!

Thanks to everyone who has shared this newsletter with a buddy or fellow sophisticated meathead. In fact, if an awesome B&B reader shared this with you, add your e-mail with the subscribe button below:

If you’re a new subscriber you’ll love this profile that the New Yorker ran on us.

A few weeks ago we featured an interview with The Terminal List’s Jack Carr about his new thriller, CRY HAVOC, read it here.

Then, a funny thing happened. The guy in charge of Jack’s book publicity, David, told me he and Jack were going to be in Vero Beach for a book signing that next week and he’d love to meet up if we could make it.

Vero is just over an hour from me so I grabbed my dad (a huge Terminal List fan) and we drove on up. We got to spend some time with Jack before the signing began and he was awesome. Very chill. Very humble. And once the talk started, I can tell you, a very good public speaker. If he’s doing a signing or event near you, I’d go.

He draws a great crowd of fans filled with military, ex-military and first responders. He tells great stories about how he started writing, Chris Pratt, publishing, being a SEAL, being a dad and more. And we got this cool pic (look closely on his book and you’ll see the Books & Biceps sticker I handed to him haha):

I’m working on a new project right now that I can’t talk about yet, but I’m in full research mode and one of the books I’m reading for it is this:

And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle by Jon Meacham

First, yes, I took this book out from the library and was in a rush and didn’t realize until I was in the car that I grabbed a Large Print Edition. I’ve never actually picked up one of these things before. The font his HUGE (obviously) and more incredible is the sheer size of the book. This thing is a full 1,000 pages! But since there’s only like 19 words per page, the reading flies by.

Second, this book came out in 2022 and won the Pulitzer Prize. I’d been meaning to read it for a long time and I’m glad I finally cracked the cover.

I’ve been a fan of Meacham for a long time and I’m pretty sure I recommended his books on Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson wayyyyy back in the early days of this newsletter. I’m talking the MailChimp, 84 readers days haha (FYI, we’re at 27,000 readers now!).

But this book on Lincoln is fantastic. I’m only about 100 giant font pages in and it’s been a unique experience learning about Lincoln’s family in his own words - many of them not complementary.

He describes his dad, Thomas Lincoln, as, “an uneducated man, a plain unpretending plodding man who attended his work, peaceable good and good natured.”

He says his grandmother, Lucey Hanks, was “a halfway prostitute, poor and credulous.”

Both of his parents battled depression, which Lincoln himself would often succumb to, and his early childhood was filled with hard labor and farm work in Kentucky.

One fact I’d never heard was that when his father moved the family from Kentucky to Indiana when Lincoln was nine, a big factor was that Kentucky was then a slave state and slavery was banned in Indiana. The Lincolns were staunchly anti-slavery, even when he was a boy. Seems to be some foreshadowing there, I’d say.

The book is densely researched and relies on a variety of resources, including extensive interviews done with Abraham while he was alive, along with interviews with nearly everyone who knew him after he was assassinated. Well worth reading for the Lincoln stories but also a great refresher on what life was like leading up to and during the Civil War. Grab it here.

We’ve all been there: You’re traveling. You’ve been eating like crap. You don’t feel like another burger. You just want to eat “healthy” but all you’ve got in front of you is a string of Subways and Chick-fil-As and Chipotles.

Sure, you could always just grab some garbage fried food (and we all do), but if you’ve had enough and you have to eat on the road, this video from Dr. Mike is super helpful. He goes to 5 of the top fast foot spots and picks the perfect meal to load up on protein with minimal fat and processed junk.

Check it out:

If you’re a guy over 40 and you’ve been looking for a new digital magazine that’s written for midlife men, by midlife men, on the topics that actually matter to us: family, fitness, fashion, finance, food & fun, then join us at Midlife Male.

I write a column every Tuesday called The Manologue. This week I revisited what it was like writing “Mean” Joe Greene’s autobiography with him over the course of four months with weekly visits to his house.

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