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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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