A book that makes the topic of hunger entirely satisfying.
Hunger takes on new meaning in O’Brien’s memoir about love, longing, and an ever growling stomach.
Many people have written about eating disorders, but a parent-inflicted eating regime is less-trod territory. In her debut memoir, the author tackles the uncomfortable truth of her mother’s obsession with healthy food. Year’s before paleo, detox, and Atkins would become common terms, O’Brien’s mother was on a mission to heal her body through her diet. But eating healthy wasn’t enough. The author’s mother forced “The Program” on her four children and TV-executive husband as well. That meant “blended salads,” juices, steamed vegetables, and rice three meals per day, with no meat and no cheating. “Drink your blended salad before it oxidizes,” O’Brien’s mother would encourage her children. Of course, all of this was also served with a heaping side of guilt, and the residual self-reproach left a bad taste in the author’s mouth for years. It wasn’t until college that O’Brien allowed herself a few crumbs of a brownie. “The brownies are gone and I’m suddenly left with the consequences of what I’ve done,” she writes. “What was I thinking? White flour and egg whites take B vitamins from the body. Chocolate never leaves our system. I feel seared with sadness….I can no longer consider myself pure.” But bad habits die hard, and even after allowing meat and sugar into her diet, O’Brien struggled with eating shame. Not surprisingly, the aftermath of a childhood deprived of sweets and meats also took its toll on her siblings, although each coped and recovered in his or her own way. Ultimately, this story isn’t just about food; it’s about the mother-daughter bond and how the desire to please one’s parents may never go away. O’Brien ably articulates this challenging relationship all children and parents struggle with, be it through food, favoritism, or failure to love.
A book that makes the topic of hunger entirely satisfying.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-12883-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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