No go-with-the-flow aging for Joan Rivers. Fight it every way you can, she exhorts: diet, exercise, makeup, clothes, plastic surgery, sex with younger men. Comedienne, talk-show host, QVC jewelry marketer, and actress, Rivers (Enter Talking, 1986), nearing 70, has been there, done that, and doesn’t plan to stop exploring what life has to offer. “Aging sucks,” she announces flatly on page one, but she advises to “go through it with dignity.” Here’s the strategy, definitely not PC, but crammed with sound bites that translate to a battle plan. Look “the best you can for your age,” advises Rivers, laying out tips on clothes, makeup, exercise, diet, and even home decorating. For instance, up-to-date wardrobes can be a “little trashy” but not “TRASHY”; go easy on the short-short skirts and the low-low necklines. Jokes about the power of gravity on breasts and butt are interspersed with discussions of symptoms of aging that are usually reserved for doctors or hairdressers (wear sexy underwear, but be especially careful to keep it clean; when hair starts to thin, use hair pieces or even hair restorers; when facial hair becomes a problem, get rid of it—Oprah Winfrey did). Face lifts are no longer a feminist no-no: Letty Cottin Pogrebin had one, Rivers reports. In other advice: exercise, eat well but lightly, have young friends, have sex regularly, never visit anyone at a place called . . . Leisure anything,” and keep your mind active. Celebrity friends and acquaintances (Kim Basinger, Lauren Hutton) offer advice throughout the book, and as usual, Rivers takes a swipe at Elizabeth Taylor, a favorite target. She even quotes Robert Browning and Emily Dickinson. Each chapter winds up with a menu of one-liners: “Never admit that your back goes out more than you do.” Old saws given new bite in the sharp-tongued Rivers mode. (Author tour; TV satellite tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-018383-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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