A funny, intelligent and informative memoir.
A Vermont blogger mom’s delightfully readable account of how she and her family survived a yearlong sugar-free diet—and lived to tell the tale.
After Schaub watched a video of a professor of medicine that claimed sugar was “a poison” and suggested that American culture “was the modern-day equivalent of an opium den,” she was both horrified and intrigued. She knew that eating sugar in excess was unhealthy. But Schaub had no idea that sugar—and, specifically, its main ingredient, fructose—was at the heart of a worldwide obesity epidemic that was affecting infants as well as children and adults. Determined to help her family kick the sugar habit (or at least moderate it), the author challenged her husband and two young daughters to live without sugar for one year. What she and her family didn’t realize was that going truly sugarless would mean more than just giving up desserts. They quickly discovered that everything—from bread to soups to salad dressings—contained trace amounts of sugar, but Schaub and her family worked around the problem. They created recipes (a few of which the author shares) for meals made from whole foods and treats sweetened with fruits or dextrose, a sugar which contains no fructose. Over time, the author found that her family’s hyperfondness for sugar gradually faded and that she herself no longer enjoyed confections as much. In fact, she developed powerful, and unpleasant, sugar headaches that left her feeling irritable and lethargic. The most telling result of this experiment revealed itself in her children’s pattern of attendance. During the family’s year of no sugar, the girls’ illness-related absences from school dropped by 75 percent. Sugar may have become the cultural shortcut “to better taste, to more convenience and to ever-higher food industry profits,” but as Schaub suggests, the path to health and happiness is best traveled conscientiously rather than quickly.
A funny, intelligent and informative memoir.Pub Date: April 8, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4022-9587-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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