Eye-opening and entertainingly voyeuristic, this impressionistic taste test illustrates the struggles more than the benefits...
An Australian travel writer’s exuberant sampling of wellness methods.
After years of drinking, smoking, and carefree eating, Guardian senior writer Delaney (This Restless Life: Churning Through Love, Work, and Travel, 2009, etc.) sought to “reset my body and my life.” Enticed by a magazine assignment, the author left Brooklyn for her native Australia to embark on a controversial, promise-laden 101-day fasting program and evaluate its effectiveness. Though the program’s core clinician diagnosed her as “highly toxic,” the author began the hardcore regimen with a mixture of enthusiasm, hopefulness, and skepticism. Though she didn’t finish successfully, the process itself was by turns fascinating, grueling, and tedious. Her body revolted, her mind raced, and her breath became repulsive; she also suffered two bouts of frightening chest pain. Delaney expanded her wellness survey to include the extreme, sweat-dripping physical demands of Bikram yoga. She also opines on the addictive nature of the multibillion-dollar wellness industry and how it has replaced religion for some, and she evaluates its place in society as a commodity. She effectively explores the nuances of the “so-called healing crisis paradox” and, through her own anecdotes and experiences, probes how and why people feel the need to detoxify their bodies (and minds) and emerge “clean” from impurities. In the final section, Delaney delves into the art of coffee colonics, meditation, and the mindful serenity craze, chronicling her time at a silent retreat. While the author reached no profound epiphany, she admits that “the road to wellness has been my own personal stations of the cross,” achieved with mixed results. Throughout the narrative, Delaney proves to be a witty tour guide across the wellness wonderland, and the book will certainly appeal to readers curious to dip their feet in.
Eye-opening and entertainingly voyeuristic, this impressionistic taste test illustrates the struggles more than the benefits of detoxification techniques.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77164-370-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Greystone Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.
This chronicle of a chaotic year filled with deep losses and rich epiphanies finds the writer and performer covering a whole lot of ground.
In terms of the calendar, Smith’s latest memoir has a tighter focus than its predecessors, M Train (2015) and Just Kids (2010), which won the National Book Award. The titular year is 2016, a year that would begin just after the author turned 69 and end with her turning 70. That year, Smith endured the death of her beloved friend Sandy Pearlman, the music producer and manager with whom she would “have coffee at Caffé Trieste, peruse the shelves of City Lights Bookstore and drive back and forth across the Golden Gate listening to the Doors and Wagner and the Grateful Dead”; and the decline of her lifelong friend and kindred spirit Sam Shepard. She held vigil for Pearlman at his hospital deathbed, and she helped Shepard revise his final manuscript, taking dictation when he could no longer type. Throughout, the author ponders time and mortality—no surprise considering her milestone birthday and the experience of losing friends who have meant so much to her. She stresses the importance of memory and the timeless nature of a person’s spirit (her late husband remains very much alive in these pages as well). Seeing her own reflection, she thinks, “I noticed I looked young and old simultaneously.” She refers to herself as the “poet detective,” and this particular year set her on a quixotic quest, with a mysterious companion unexpectedly reappearing amid a backdrop of rock touring, lecture touring, vagabond traveling, and a poisonous political landscape. “I was still moving within an atmosphere of artificial brightness with corrosive edges,” she writes, “the hyperreality of a polarizing pre-election mudslide, an avalanche of toxicity infiltrating every outpost.”
A captivating, redemptive chronicle of a year in which Smith looked intently into the abyss.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-65768-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in...
Legendary performance artist Abramovic unveils her story in this highly anticipated memoir.
When she was growing up, the author lived in an environment of privilege in Yugoslavia, which was on the verge of ruin. Her parents, two fervent communist partisans and loyal officers during Josip Broz Tito’s rule, were not the warmest people. Abramovic was put under the care of several people, only to be taken in by her grandmother. “I felt displaced and I probably thought that if I walked, it meant I would have to go away again somewhere,” she writes. Ultimately, she carried this feeling of displacement throughout most, if not all, of her career. Many remember The Artist Is Present, her 2010 performance at the Museum of Modern Art in New York during which she sat in front of museumgoers for 736 hours, but her work started long before then. As a woman who almost single-handedly launched female performance art, the author has spent the better part of her life studying the different ways in which the body functions in time and space. She pushed herself to explore her body’s limits and her mind’s boundaries (“I [have] put myself in so much pain that I no longer [feel] any pain”). For example, she stood in front of a bow and arrow aimed at her heart with her romantic and performance partner of 12 years, Ulay. She was also one of the first people to walk along the Great Wall of China, a project she conceived when secluded in aboriginal Australia. While the author’s writing could use some polishing, the voice that seeps through the text is hypnotizing, and readers will have a hard time putting the book down and will seek out further information about her work.
Her biographer, James Westcott, once said: “every time she tells a story, it gets better,” and one can’t help but wait in anticipation of what she is concocting for her next tour de force.Pub Date: Oct. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-90504-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
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