Clear chapter organization and a thorough index make this a useful tool regardless of a reader’s level of commitment to...
Kemp offers a practical guide to healthy living, drawn from the author’s life as well as advice from nutritional and medical experts.
Healthy living is a popular topic, but Kemp’s book is noteworthy for its thorough, balanced approach and its welcome lack of an ax to grind. The clearly organized and comprehensive work methodically covers physical fitness, healthy eating and mental exercise, and each chapter includes examples and questions to help readers review the material and apply it to their own lives. Kemp holds a doctorate in education, and he is careful to emphasize that changing old habits can be difficult, but also that learning the benefits of such changes and what they can achieve is a key starting point. Although his tone is resolutely nonjudgmental, he’s obviously passionate about wanting to share what he’s learned about healthy living with others. There’s little if any primary reporting in the book, but Kemp’s secondary sources are scrupulously noted and generally authoritative or at least reputable. What’s more, the author provides plentiful resources for readers who want to learn more, and is particularly good with recent technology, such as a helpful iPhone diet data app. As the fact that so many of Kemp’s sources are government websites suggests, the information he presents is generally not obscure. And, largely because he attempts to accommodate readers who may not be reading every chapter, there is a certain amount of repetition in coverage. The very comprehensiveness of the book also means that some topics aren’t explored in-depth, which is unfortunate as Kemp is at his best when he delves into the nitty-gritty how-to details such as label-reading. Those contemplating a healthier lifestyle will find this book a useful primer; those already committed to healthy living may find some parts too basic.
Clear chapter organization and a thorough index make this a useful tool regardless of a reader’s level of commitment to healthy living.Pub Date: May 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450053648
Page Count: 347
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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