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 Yorker staff 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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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