Le Dean skillfully guides readers on a journey through weight loss while maintaining a healthy perspective.
Le Dean’s debut self-help book, cleverly disguised as a diet book, makes a case for transforming one’s body through a series of gradual, sustainable changes.
Le Dean strikes a note of balance right from the start, explaining that her mission is to “reclaim the original definition of ‘diet’—simply, the food and drink a person regularly consumes.” She encourages readers to architect their own one-way journeys toward weight loss, recommending gradual, sustainable changes over drastic, desperate measures. “There is no real ‘finish line,’ ” she writes. “Your ideal weight is an admirable goal to aspire to, but the greater goal is to try to enjoy the process.” Her tools for easing said process range from incremental food substitutions to a Red-Yellow-Green-light food chart for those who’d rather follow set guidelines than read labels. Le Dean’s writing is grounded, authoritative and thoroughly approachable—she captures the charisma of a motivational speaker without the corniness. Her only bobble is the Red-Yellow-Green food chart; the foods don’t seem to occupy any particular order, making it difficult to find what you’re looking for quickly. Directions to “scroll through” the chart make sense in the electronic version but are awkward in print. Chart notwithstanding, Le Dean provides all the tools to recognize, own and finally transform one’s relationship with food. She also couldn’t make her approach any less cookie-cutter; she dodges some hot-topic issues like whether artificial sweeteners help or hinder weight loss, but she isn’t shy about bucking popular opinion in other areas, as when she suggests getting on the scale every single day. But unlike many other diet-book authors, she always explains exactly where she’s coming from and why, leaving it up to the reader to make the final judgment.
Le Dean skillfully guides readers on a journey through weight loss while maintaining a healthy perspective.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1478207474
Page Count: 220
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
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