Insightful and informative, with fresh insights into the nature of eating disorders.
British journalist Woolf documents her struggle with anorexia.
Expanding on her weekly columns for the Times (London), the author chronicles her affliction and her work to overcome it. By her early 30s, she had stabilized after 10 years of starving herself, rising from a frighteningly low weight of 77 pounds to a merely painfully thin 105. She yearned to start a family, and she knew her boyfriend was right when he told her she needed to give up running and start eating more if she wanted to get pregnant. But she just wasn't sure she could do it. In this heartfelt look at the causes of her eating disorder, Woolf emphatically states that her anorexia was not the result of striving to look good based on unrealistic media images but rather a mental illness based on her need for control. She admits that, deep down, a part of her wanted to remain sick: “I needed to be visibly thin; in some strange way I needed the chaos inside my head to show on the outside.” Woolf reveals how she avoided food or any social situation at which she might have to eat, while at the same time obsessively exercising and never slowing down. Step by step, she changed her behavior; she frankly discusses which therapies worked for her and which didn’t, though she declares herself open to the potential merits of each for other anorexics. As Woolf walked through her personal process of self-discovery and change in her newspaper columns, she touched a chord with fellow sufferers, their families and their therapists, whose responses she includes here. Her perceptive and articulate account is frank about the mental torment she endured without being morose.
Insightful and informative, with fresh insights into the nature of eating disorders.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59376-515-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Daniels emerges as a force to be reckoned with—and not someone to cross. Of interest to politics junkies but with plenty of...
A lively, candid memoir from person-in-the-news Daniels.
The author is a household name for just one reason, as she allows—adding, though, that “my life is a lot more interesting than an encounter with Donald Trump.” So it is, and not without considerable effort on her part. Daniels—not her real name, but one, she points out, that she owns, unlike the majority of porn stars—grew up on the wrong side of town, the product of a broken home with few prospects, but she is just as clearly a person of real intelligence and considerable business know-how. Those attributes were not the reason that Trump called her on a fateful night more than a decade ago, but she put them to work, so much so that in some preliminary conversation, he proclaimed—by her account, his talk is blustery and insistent—that “our businesses are kind of a lot alike, but different.” The talk led to what “may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion.” The details are deeply unpleasant, but Daniels adds nuance to the record: She doesn’t find it creepy that Trump likened her to his daughter, and she reckons that as a reality show host, he had a few points in his favor even if he failed to deliver on a promise to get her on The Apprentice. The author’s 15 minutes arrived a dozen years later, when she was exposed as the recipient of campaign hush money. Her account of succeeding events is fast-paced and full of sharp asides pointing to the general sleaziness of most of the players and the ugliness of politics, especially the Trumpian kind, which makes the porn industry look squeaky-clean by comparison.
Daniels emerges as a force to be reckoned with—and not someone to cross. Of interest to politics junkies but with plenty of lessons on taking charge of one’s own life.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-20556-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2018
An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.
A compelling, profoundly unsettling blend of memoir and manifesto that proposes that—by design—matters will never improve for African Americans.
To be black, writes Wilderson III, who chairs the African American Studies program at the University of California, Irvine, is not just likely to descend from slaves, but to be forever condemned to the existential condition of a slave. As he writes, “slavery did not end in 1865. It is a relational dynamic…[that] can continue to exist once the settler has left or ceded governmental power.” No other ethnic group—not Native Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, or Hispanic Americans—in the U.S. suffers the same institutional violence, and, Wilderson suggests, all others are more structurally aligned with the white oppressor than with the oppressed African American in a system that hinges on violence. Blending affecting memoir that touches on such matters as mental illness, alienation, exile, and a transcendent maternal love with brittle condemnation of a condition of unfreedom and relentless othering, the author delivers a difficult but necessary argument. It is difficult because it demands that readers of any ethnicity confront hard truths and also because it is densely written, with thickets of postmodern tropes to work through (“blackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whim…a disfigured and disfiguring phobic phenomenon”). The book is deeply pessimistic indeed, as Wilderson rejects any possibility of racial reconciliation in these two-steps-backward times. Perhaps the greatest value of the book is in its posing of questions that may seem rhetorical but in fact probe at interethnic conflicts that are hundreds, even thousands of years old. Wilderson advances a growing body of theory that must be reckoned with and that “has secured a mandate from Black people at their best; which is to say, a mandate to speak the analysis and rage that most Black people are free only to whisper.”
An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-614-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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