Born to Run / Christopher McDougall / Six Degrees of Mixed Media

Wondering how far you could take mixing books with films, I had lots of fun creating a Six Degrees list inspired by a RAT Nonfiction benchmark title from Round 4 ...  :-)

SIX DEGREES OF MIXED MEDIA

In Born to Run: a Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World has Never Seen, Christopher McDougall investigates ultra-marathon athletes, the science of running, and the reclusive Tarahumara Indians, the fastest runners in the world.

The Tarahumara tribe live in the Sierra Madre Mountains in Mexico, which brought to mind Humphrey Bogart and the film Treasure of the Sierra Madre, from a book by B. Traven.

The Bogart film lead to ... The Making of the African Queen: Or How I Went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall, and Huston and Almost Lost my Mind by Katherine Hepburn.

Hepburn’s book reminded me of ... ‘White Hunter, Black Heart’, a Clint Eastwood film based on Peter Viertel’s book, inspired by events which took place while director John Huston and others were on safari during the filming of ‘The African Queen.’

Thinking about trips to Africa lead to ... Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible about a harsh evangelical Baptist missionary, Nathan Price, who takes his wife and his four daughters on a mission to the Belgian Congo...

Missionaries brought to mind the movie ‘Chariots of Fire’ about Eric Liddell, Scottish missionary, and Harold Abrahams, Cambridge student, who compete in the 1924 Olympics as runners for Great Britain (based on William J. Weatherby’s book).

The film ‘Chariots of Fire’ is ultimately about the joy and science of running which leads back to McDougall’s Born to Run ...

List courtesy of The RAT Queen