A candid and inspiring memoir.
A young blogger shares the story of how she overcame a lifetime of bad eating habits, lost the weight that threatened her health and began her journey to self-understanding.
Mitchell came from a working-class “family of eaters.” But beneath the “heaps and sloppy gobs and spilling surplus” of food she consumed was a dysfunctional home situation that included a chronically unemployed alcoholic father and a mother who struggled to support the family with wages from multiple jobs. Food—especially cookies, cakes and other sweets—became the author’s source of comfort and the way her mother could assuage her guilt for being unavailable. It also helped her forge a bond with the troubled, overweight father who drifted from the family and eventually died in poverty. The perennial target of schoolmate jokes about her size, Mitchell weighed 200 pounds by the end of seventh grade. Her sense of humor eventually made her popular among her peers, but her weight continued to increase. Mitchell signed up for medical studies and weight loss programs, but nothing worked. In college, she reached 268 pounds. Not just obese, “but morbidly so,” Mitchell began a strict regimen of exercising, dieting and journaling. A semester in Rome showed her a whole new way of eating that was as delicious as it was healthy. During her senior year of college, she eventually reached 133 pounds, only to realize that she now had to tackle a whole set of psychological issues that, in her drive to lose weight, she had ignored. Overeating had only been a symptom of a far deeper problem. To manage it, she had to learn to love herself and her body, understand the meaning of life-balance and ultimately accept that life had far more to teach her than she ever realized.
A candid and inspiring memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-7704-3324-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2014
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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