For those who value mental fitness, Nietzsche Awakens! by Farid Younes is an essential read. In this slim volume, the author reworks all of Nietzsche's famous aphorisms . . . Why not? . . . and then invites Nietzsche himself to respond!   Farid Younes is a philosopher, architect, and college professor who makes his home in Byblos, a coastal town in northern Lebanon. He lived through both the Lebanese and now the Syrian civil wars. Like all Lebanese, he has plenty of "serious" in his life. The need for him and other Lebanese is to find the distance needed to cope and if possible to move events and circumstances in a better direction.    Nietzsche Awakens! is a refined and disciplined version of a coffee house like the famous "Haven--The Cabin" that rests on a Byblos hilltop looking out over the Mediterranean.     Here, the author's neighbors meditate over their chess boards or chat quietly and put the pieces of their world back together. Nietzsche Awakens! is a mind game, that could almost have been lifted from conversations in The Cabin. It is the author's invitation to each of us to test and tone our intellect, to use our intelligence to create clever word play and to define razor sharp slices of meaning.     At a certain point, the parlor game of this book reaches depths that Nietzsche (a famously troubled soul) experienced in his own life--depths that Farid Younes and his fellow citizens know all too well. Farid's discourse is a precise and rarefied melody that floats through his book . . . and yet his text has a base line, far below, that is sensed rather than read, felt more than heard: it is visceral, a physical pressure, a movement of darkness. It is the tangible mental byproduct of the unspeakable cruelty and carnage of war and the despair of refugees who line the Lebanese streets.   Where are we . . . who are we . . .  if our minds do not work? Mental fitness can be a gift, but it is also an obligation of each one of us to ourselves, our families, our communities .   As the Muslim and Christian knights of Crusader times battled for their idea of truth in these steep mountains above the Mediterranean, today humanity itself is called to combat the prejudice, stupidity, rigid thinking, blatant self-dealing, and the other idiocies that prevent us from addressing the primary challenges of our time.   Nietzsche Awakens! is a vigorous mental work out . . .  with much more below the surface.