Comprehensive, cogent and smartly packaged; should have great appeal to those with a real interest in better body management.
This unique guide is cleverly constructed to explain the operation and health of the human body in business terms.
Instead of offering the typical prescription for healthy eating, exercise and stress reduction, as so many books do, debut author Foard compares the body to a large corporation. He chose to explain it this way as he was diagnosed with a chronic, irreversible health condition, and he wanted to use his knowledge of biology, combined with his experience as a business consultant, to learn as much as possible about how the body works so he could possibly beat the disease. Using the metaphor of the body as a business, Foard ingeniously describes the body’s various functions: “Within our body are the standard systems we find in any business.” The digestive tract becomes a “disassembly plant,” the immune system is the body’s “security,” and the intestines and colon are a “delicate nutrient extraction system.” The author covers how to take control and become “the CEO of our Body.” Foard criticizes the “Western diet,” noting that “consumers today are willing to compromise health for convenience.” He recommends reducing reliance on processed foods, cooking at home and avoiding artificial ingredients, and he includes a discussion of probiotics, cautioning that “we have to be careful of the marketing messages when making buying decisions based on buzzwords.” The guide proposes a “Strategic Framework for Health,” which highlights the need to be proactive about the health of the body. Readers may find some of his recommendations extreme; for example, he advocates doing a “decomposition analysis”—analyzing the nutritional content of every food consumed over a period of time. Still, he bases much of his advice on research that he scrupulously documents.
Comprehensive, cogent and smartly packaged; should have great appeal to those with a real interest in better body management.Pub Date: March 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0989874304
Page Count: 232
Publisher: CVFPublishing Inc
Review Posted Online: July 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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