There is something a little stubborn and old-souled about My Pilates Rendezvous, and I mean that as both compliment and warning.
Spiridon Alexander is not content to tell a neat recovery story and exit. He wants to recover a lineage, reclaim a philosophy, correct a culture, and argue that Joseph Pilates has been badly simplified by people who prefer performance to understanding. It makes the book unruly at times, but never indifferent. I would rather have that than the polished emptiness of so much lifestyle writing.
The strongest passages are the ones where Alexander moves between the injured body he once inhabited and the historical world he is trying to reconstruct. Those sections feel personal without becoming sentimental. They also make his fascination with Contrology feel earned rather than borrowed.
The weaker stretches come when certainty takes over. The book can sound as if it has solved questions that are, at best, still debatable. But I found myself forgiving some of that because conviction is the motor here. This is not a tidy book. It is an earnest, argumentative one, and there are readers for whom that will be more nourishing anyway.