A well-illustrated and comprehensive low-stress program for eating and exercising better.
A debut step-by-step guide focuses on achieving a healthier lifestyle through diet and exercise.
Digenio opens his well-designed manual with some sobering observations about American life in modern times: increased stress, high intakes of saturated and trans fats, increased portion sizes, and a growth of what the author calls “sedentarism,” adults spending more and more hours sitting around. These and other factors have led to an upsurge in chronic health problems, and the solution is obvious: a shift from curative reactions toward preventative approaches that modify unhealthy behaviors in order to circumvent future long-term complications. To combat sedentarism and obesity, the author—a Uruguay-born physician with extensive training in cardiovascular care who lives in New Jersey—developed a PulseStep Lifestyle Program. He illustrates this plan throughout the book with the example of Jason, a 43-year-old overweight man with Type 2 diabetes. When Jason’s doctors urge him to go on a weight-loss program, he and his wife, Brenda, conduct some research on various dietary plans. After considering alternatives, they decide to use PulseStep, which is based on three pillars: “a healthy, low-calorie Mediterranean diet, an increase in physical activity, and behavior-therapy strategies.” Jason is encouraged to assess his current level of exercise and dietary health, equipped with a pedometer (and told that he should add at least 500 steps to his daily goal each week), and reminded of the basics: “Fewer calories in and more calories out.” Progress is to be monitored with weekly weigh-ins. In clear and heavily bullet-pointed prose, accompanied by extensive full-color images by debut illustrator Ponce, the guide takes readers through the three pillars of Digenio’s program. The details of a Mediterranean diet are explored: more fresh foods, fewer processed items, healthy fats, fish, and moderate amounts of wine (a useful food pyramid and daily portion breakdown are provided). A plan for regular walking is laid out with sensible goals and cautions against overdoing things—a demonstration of the sympathetic approach the author employs throughout the book. He anticipates all the usual excuses people make to avoid exercising, and he gently but firmly short-circuits all of them. This is first and foremost an achievable weight-loss regimen, complete with Digenio’s common-sense advice on the whole range of smarter eating techniques, from devouring smaller portions to consuming food more slowly and simply waiting when the urge to snack surfaces. The manual’s recurrent use of Jason as an Everyman example of somebody seeking to lose weight and get healthier, combined with its copious charts and graphs, makes it easy for readers to grasp the whole program and visualize its possible outcomes. The author examines both the customary discouragements of starting to learn so many new habits and the typical advantages that result from sticking with the course. All of it is presented in such straightforward, optimistic tones that even readers who’ve tried and failed at other dieting routines should find this one easy to embrace.
A well-illustrated and comprehensive low-stress program for eating and exercising better.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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