A vibrant and thoroughly inspiring plan to reinvent our eating habits and improve our health.
A detailed guide to transforming your diet—and health.
Shah begins his nonfiction debut about revamping his diet by asserting that he’s 66 but has the energy of a man in his 40s; he’s completed seven marathons, his blood pressure and glucose levels are perfect, his brain is sharp, his mood is stable, his sleep is untroubled, and so on. His secret is simple: He eliminated all artificial foods from his diet. No processed foods, no refined carbohydrates, no animal products, no extracted oils—the author cut out everything during the course of over 16 years. His new diet led him to the realization that he wasn’t sick, even though he’d so often felt that he was suffering from chronic illness; he’d been energy-starved. He goes into great detail in these pages, supported by extensive sources, and provides readers with guidance tailored to various life stages, from pregnancy to old age. Shah stresses that he’s neither a doctor nor a dietician—he’s drawing on his own experiences and research. He states that his ultimate goal is to remind readers that they have more power than they think, and he offers strategies to help them research and implement their options. A tone of cheerful pragmatism runs throughout the author’s “Energy Restoration Protocol,” sharply differentiating it from most other dietary self-help books. “The difference between people who transform and people who don’t isn’t intelligence or motivation,” he writes. “It’s the ability to implement the protocol in the real world, not the theoretical world.” Some of his advice for sustaining good protein and nutrient levels will strike beginners in dietary reform as difficult or impossible, especially if they live in food deserts, but he reminds such readers that they don’t need to be wealthy to eat well (healthy whole-plant foods are cheaper than processed options); it’s only a matter of changing attitudes and receiving good guidance. Shah provides consistent encouragement for the former and invaluable detailed examples of the latter.
A vibrant and thoroughly inspiring plan to reinvent our eating habits and improve our health.Pub Date: March 23, 2026
ISBN: 9798994037805
Page Count: 334
Publisher: Nature Trust Press
Review Posted Online: today
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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