An energetic, optimistic, and worthwhile blueprint for adding mindfulness to daily life.
A debut guide offers a multipronged plan for improving health and well-being.
The wheel at the heart of Martin’s slim book has “community” at its hub. Twenty years of wide-ranging reading and experiences have left the author with the strong conviction that community—friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors—is the crucial center of gravity for a healthy, well-grounded life. “Human beings are social animals,” she writes. “Community is where it starts and where it ends.” The rest of the wheel—the different parts of the hub circling that center—is made up of the six ingredients that “add up to optimum emotional, physical, and spiritual wellness.” Those items are “Purpose,” “Mindset,” “Sleep,” “Constitution,” “Lifestyle,” and “Food.” Over the course of the manual, Martin elaborates on each of these components, first giving her readers several tips on how to build the kind of community that sustains those elements. After that, each ingredient is discussed at length—and in surprising detail for so short a book. She takes readers through the basis of a sound diet, the outlines of a “sleep survival tool kit” (citing, for instance, the current figures of chronic sleep deprivation in the United States and the deleterious health effects associated with that), and alternate methods of understanding health paradigms, such as India’s Ayurvedic lifestyle. She delivers all of this advice with a breezy, optimistic tone that’s immediately inviting to readers, especially those who may be feeling guilty or touchy about neglecting such basics as “seek out activities you enjoy,” “get out in nature,” and “walk, walk, walk.” Some of this advice is too simplistic—“You are what you think,” and “Do what makes you happy.” But most of the counsel achieves a very pleasing mix of practical and aspirational. In addition, the guide is well designed: The visuals very much help to break down the main points.
An energetic, optimistic, and worthwhile blueprint for adding mindfulness to daily life.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-03-911752-5
Page Count: 180
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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