A revealing look at the self-sustaining cycle of food addiction and weight gain and the heart-rending consequences that...
In her debut memoir, a Greek-American woman chronicles her lifelong struggle with weight and the desperate measures she took to combat it.
For years, Angeliades had suspected that she had started to pack on the pounds around the time she started kindergarten. When she was in her 20s, however, she discovered a piece of video evidence that proved otherwise: A family tape showed her shoveling up small pieces of steak when she was just a toddler. Whether or not that early enthusiasm for meat led to her dangerous overeating, Angeliades became obsessed with food. At the age of 15, she was 5 feet 2 inches tall, weighed 187 pounds, and had been diagnosed by her doctor as morbidly obese. Over time, she slipped into a worsening cycle of weight gain and overeating, a problem that eroded her self-esteem: “Being fat wasn’t exhausting. What really drained me were my efforts to distract the world from noticing my being fat. A good day was when no one called me ‘Fatso’ or otherwise commented on my largeness.” Angeliades movingly describes a childhood marked by trying desperately to fit in—not just into her clothes, but with her peers. The teen years are rough on any child, but hers were made worse by her size. A black leather belt used to re-create Madonna’s style, for example, looked like a “tourniquet that forced my blubber to move both north and south.” By the time she reached her late 20s, Angeliades had tried seemingly everything in vain: diets, spas, Weight Watchers, fat farms. She eventually turned to spirituality as a way to accept herself and now, nearing 40, only carries a few extra pounds. Angeliades injects welcome doses of humor into her story, which includes a hilarious aside about her childhood summers on the Greek islands. The book contains some unnecessary material that distracts from its focus, such as the author’s dating advice and perhaps too much on her spirituality. Nevertheless Angeliades’ struggles are real, and her voice is strikingly authentic.
A revealing look at the self-sustaining cycle of food addiction and weight gain and the heart-rending consequences that occur when it takes over a life.Pub Date: June 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0990469407
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Me Gigi Says Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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