I do not automatically trust a contrarian book. But I often trust one more than a book that seems too eager to agree with the room.
That is part of what I responded to in My Pilates Rendezvous. Spiridon Alexander is plainly arguing with the dominant assumptions of modern fitness culture: the worship of intensity, the aesthetic performance of discipline, the idea that effort itself is proof of wisdom. He is not subtle about it. Sometimes that works for him. Sometimes it pushes the argument past its evidence.
Even so, there is a useful seriousness in the attempt. Alexander keeps asking what exercise is actually for once a person has to live inside the consequences. His answer is capability. Integration. A body that can do more, not merely display more. That frame feels sturdier than most of what the category rewards.
I do not need every nonfiction book to be balanced into harmlessness. Sometimes I want one that risks being a little unfashionable, a little insistent, maybe even a little annoying, because there is usually an honest question underneath it. This one has several.