Kazdin’s painful honesty is leavened with humor and irony. Hopefully, this book will reach the people who need it.
Eating disorders are a massive yet often hidden problem, writes the author, who speaks with the insight of experience.
Early on, Kazdin, a four-time Emmy Award–winning TV journalist, cites some remarkable, frightening statistics. “Over 90 percent of women in the United States are dissatisfied with their bodies,” she writes, and nearly 30 million people “suffer from an eating disorder.” Furthermore, eating disorders have the second-highest mortality rate of any mental illness, on a par with opioid deaths, and the problem crosses socio-economic lines. Kazdin has struggled with a disorder herself, and her book is as much her personal story as an examination of body anxiety. The author discusses how diet and weight-loss businesses are rebranding themselves as being about good health, a misleading ploy to continue to grow an industry approaching a valuation of $300 billion. “Weight stigma is deeply embedded into our culture,” she writes. The idea that thinness equals personal worth and social success is everywhere. Kazdin examines the wide range of diets on the market and concludes that they simply do not work. Some will lead to temporary weight loss, but it always comes back. The author’s own obsessive drive to be thin involved starvation-level diets, punishing exercise routines, and, ultimately, self-induced vomiting. All this made her feel in control—at least until the larger health consequences began to appear. Through therapy and support, she managed to build something like a normal life, but she wonders if she will ever completely recover. “My eating disorder never left,” she writes. “It’s always there, lying in wait like a trained assassin.” The author also describes new research suggesting that eating disorders may stem from physical problems in the brain rather than from behavioral issues, which would fundamentally change treatment options. The real solution, she writes, is to get past the social pressure and achieve self-acceptance.
Kazdin’s painful honesty is leavened with humor and irony. Hopefully, this book will reach the people who need it.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-250-28284-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's Essentials
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
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
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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