Unobtrusive reading material for your next trip on the treadmill.
The bestselling author of The Know-It-All (2004) and The Year of Living Biblically (2007) stretches the experiential journalist shtick to its limit with a cockamamie fitness quest to become the “healthiest man alive.”
Jacobs, an affable everyman with a ready supply of reliable one-liners, offers a moderately entertaining literary stunt. Some might spend 10 years or more dabbling in this or that fitness craze; the author runs the entire gauntlet in a period of months. One month he’s running bare-chested through Central Park like a caveman. The next he’s eating off kiddie plates (to reduce portion size) and squatting over the toilet (to facilitate smoother excretions). The author tests a variety of differing health prescriptions but quickly settles into a rut of conflicting information, unsettled medical consensus and eye rolling from his wife. He dedicates each month to a different part of the body—the stomach, the heart, the teeth, etc. By the end Jacobs has donned a bicycle helmet for simple walks around town in order to protect his fragile skull. Any hope of gaining a leg up on the Grim Reaper evaporates into a mist of futile perspiration. Despite his labors, the best advice the author offers is eat less, move more and try to steer clear of pollutants. Periodic visits to his 94-year-old grandfather (who has “the relentless energy and hearty build of Theodore Roosevelt”) are welcome detours, alleviating the drudgery and providing much-needed authenticity to an otherwise contrived exercise. The story of granddad’s long and rich life as a crusading lawyer (he helped bring “The Gates” art installation to Central Park) lends sharp perspective to Jacobs’ somewhat myopic quest. Maybe the goal shouldn’t be becoming the healthiest man alive, but to live life to the fullest.
Unobtrusive reading material for your next trip on the treadmill.Pub Date: April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9907-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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