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
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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