An engaging self-help book that offers a clear road map for extending one’s life span.
Clean living improves the odds for a long life, according to this fascinating primer on the medical realities of aging.
Cortvriendt, a physician, focuses on the nutritional and lifestyle factors that affect our susceptibility to cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and cancer. Front and center is his detailed, wonderfully lucid discussion of food, which takes readers from the basic chemistries of carbohydrates, fats and proteins and their metabolism in the body through the subtle and often strange complexities of dieting. (Excess carbohydrates are bad, but an Atkins-style ban will do much more harm than good, he writes.) He provides a skeptical take on vitamin and antioxidant supplements; vitamins A and E, he writes, have been found to actually increase cancer risks at high doses. He balances this with the seemingly miraculous assertion that eating dark chocolate protects against cancer, diabetes and other ailments; tobacco is anathema, alcohol tolerable and coffee a downright boon, he says. However, Cortvriendt advises that what we do is as important as what we ingest and that there’s no end to the benefits of exercise, which wards off hypertension, dementia and other ills. Basking in sunlight may perk you up, the author says, but it can also give you cancer or make you look old. The book also advises that seething Type A personalities should learn to relax and meditate. There are facts, figures and charts galore, but the author presents the information in simple, straightforward prose that laypeople will understand, while paying due attention to complexities; for example, he explains the pitfalls of deriving reliable conclusions from a muddle of medical statistics and offers shrewd, evenhanded assessments of the conflicting evidence surrounding medical controversies. The result is an absorbing, highly readable exposition of the science of health that yields a wealth of common-sense advice.
An engaging self-help book that offers a clear road map for extending one’s life span.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4928-7008-1
Page Count: 380
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
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