Christopher McDougall’s Natural Born Heroes begins with one of the most audacious stories of World War II. But what kept me turning the pages was where he took the story next.
I picked up Natural Born Heroes: How a Daring Band of Misfits Mastered the Lost Secrets of Strength and Endurance because of Crete.
I kept reading because I couldn’t put it down.
World War II has never felt like distant history to me. My family comes from Crete, and my father came to America in the aftermath of the war, eventually beginning his new life in Pittsburgh. His “war stories” were part of my upbringing and they shaped my keen interest in the subject of Greece’s role during World War II for my entire life.
So when a book takes me into occupied Crete—into its mountains, villages and the extraordinary resistance of ordinary Cretans—I am already reading it through a very personal lens.
But Natural Born Heroes surprised me because it isn’t really just a war story.
Author Christopher McDougall, best known for Born to Run, begins with one of the most daring episodes of the German occupation of Crete: the 1944 kidnapping of German General Heinrich Kreipe.
British officers Patrick Leigh Fermor and William Stanley Moss, working with Cretan resistance fighters, abducted Kreipe and somehow moved him across the mountains of an island crawling with German troops before eventually getting him off Crete.
It is an extraordinary story on its own. But McDougall asks an even more interesting question:
How were seemingly ordinary people capable of doing something so physically and mentally extraordinary?
And that is where the book takes off.
What Makes a Hero?
McDougall follows that question out of wartime Crete and into an exploration of endurance, movement, nutrition, metabolism and the human body itself.
I found myself learning about the difference between brute strength and functional strength. About endurance. About natural movement. About how the body uses energy. About ancient approaches to physical conditioning and whether modern life has caused us to forget abilities our bodies were designed to possess.
It is history, adventure, science and fitness all wrapped into one fascinating narrative.
And running through all of it is Crete.
The mountains. The shepherds. The resistance fighters.
People capable of moving enormous distances across unforgiving terrain, surviving with little, improvising when circumstances demanded it and somehow continuing when common sense might have told them to stop.
Looking at Crete Differently
That part hit me personally.
I grew up connected to Crete and to a generation of people shaped by very different circumstances than ours. Their lives demanded resilience.
They walked more. They carried things. They worked with their hands. They ate differently. They depended on one another differently.
Reading Natural Born Heroes made me look at some of those qualities through an entirely different lens.
What I loved most about the book is that McDougall doesn’t treat history as something sealed away safely in the past.
He uses history to ask questions about us and our lives in the present day.
What have we lost? What could we relearn? And are some of the qualities we admire in people from another era actually still sitting somewhere inside us?
Rethinking What It Means to Be Strong
For someone with my own family connection to Crete and to the generation shaped by World War II, those questions made this book especially powerful.
It made me think differently about the toughness of that generation and even about what we mean when we call someone “strong.”
Sometimes strength isn’t about being the biggest person in the room.
Sometimes it is endurance. Adaptability. Ingenuity. Community. The ability to remain calm when circumstances become chaotic.
And knowing how to keep moving when everything around you says you shouldn’t be able to.
Natural Born Heroes was one of those rare books that gave me a remarkable historical story while simultaneously making me reconsider the present.
I finished it knowing much more about wartime Crete.
But I also finished it wondering how much we modern humans have forgotten about ourselves.
And that is probably the biggest compliment I can give a book: days after putting it down, I am still thinking about it.
Put This One on Your Reading List
If you are interested in Crete, World War II, the Greek Resistance, adventure, human endurance—or simply great storytelling—this is one I highly recommend.
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