A clear, detailed road map to getting in shape for serious fitness enthusiasts.
Cut the calories and lift the weights—but in exactly the right ways—to get a muscular, athletic body, argues this second edition of a guide to dieting and exercise.
Lee (The Essential Guide to Sports Nutrition and Bodybuilding, 2018, etc.) starts with the insight that losing weight is a matter of burning more calories than people consume. But while it’s “really as simple as that,” this practice is far from straightforward. Once readers have adopted a diet that puts them in a calorie deficit—more burned than eaten—they have to get the right balance of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, the author asserts, as well as micronutrients, from vitamin A to selenium. And he points out the vexing ups and downs of dieting. As people lose weight, their metabolisms slow, making it harder to burn calories—Lee suggests periodic diet breaks and “re-feeds” to kick the metabolism back up a notch—and they face weight-loss plateaus, water-weight fluctuations, bloating, fatigue, and cravings. The author then analyzes the other half of the complex equation, building muscle through weight lifting. He distinguishes the different types of muscle fibers and the various exercise regimens to train them, using low-weight, high-rep lifts for endurance and high-weight, low-rep lifts for size and strength. Then he delves into the byzantine interactions between diet and exercise. Weight lifting burns carbs but not much fat, so Lee recommends a cycling diet of high carbs on gym days followed by high fat on jogging days. And growing new muscle requires a calorie surplus, which means additional fat gain, thus necessitating, in the author’s scheme, larger cycles in which people cut fat on a diet, then eat more to bulk up on muscle, then diet again to shrink the fat so as to reveal the muscle definition they want to show off. So there’s a lot to learn, ponder, and calculate in the author’s system; it’s not a cookie-cutter approach, and readers need to do some work and a little arithmetic in applying it. Fortunately, Lee makes this fairly easy with clear, step-by-step instructions and planning aids. He shows readers how to find their “maintenance” calorie intake and figure out how many calories they need to cut to reach an appropriate deficit along with procedures to reckon the amount of protein—1 gram per pound per day when dieting, a little more for bulking—carbs, and fat in their diets. Superplants packed with micronutrients—hail kale—are discussed along with bodybuilding nutritional supplements. (The author recommends whey protein, creatine phosphate, and yohimbine.) Lee provides weekly weight lifting schedules and routines for men and women, specifying everything from the number of sets of Bulgarian split squats and butt-blasters to the minutes of rest in between reps; templates for tracking calories and exercises; dozens of inspirational color photographs of magnificently toned, ripped, and cut gym rats; and even suggestions for a workout playlist. There’s a massive amount of information here, but the author manages to keep it well organized, lucid, and readable. He boils the material down into bullet-pointed insights, convenient tables, cut-and-dried formulas, easy-to-use rules, and aphorisms—“The longer it takes to lose the fat, the longer it takes to put it back on”—that are both sensible and pithy.
A clear, detailed road map to getting in shape for serious fitness enthusiasts.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-916410-53-4
Page Count: 477
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.
The renowned writer offers advice on information-gathering and nonfiction composition.
The book consists of eight instructive and charming essays about creating narratives, all of them originally composed for the New Yorker, where McPhee (Silk Parachute, 2010, etc.) has been a contributor since the mid-1960s. Reading them consecutively in one volume constitutes a master class in writing, as the author clearly demonstrates why he has taught so successfully part-time for decades at Princeton University. In one of the essays, McPhee focuses on the personalities and skills of editors and publishers for whom he has worked, and his descriptions of those men and women are insightful and delightful. The main personality throughout the collection, though, is McPhee himself. He is frequently self-deprecating, occasionally openly proud of his accomplishments, and never boring. In his magazine articles and the books resulting from them, McPhee rarely injects himself except superficially. Within these essays, he offers a departure by revealing quite a bit about his journalism, his teaching life, and daughters, two of whom write professionally. Throughout the collection, there emerge passages of sly, subtle humor, a quality often absent in McPhee’s lengthy magazine pieces. Since some subjects are so weighty—especially those dealing with geology—the writing can seem dry. There is no dry prose here, however. Almost every sentence sparkles, with wordplay evident throughout. Another bonus is the detailed explanation of how McPhee decided to tackle certain topics and then how he chose to structure the resulting pieces. Readers already familiar with the author’s masterpieces—e.g., Levels of the Game, Encounters with the Archdruid, Looking for a Ship, Uncommon Carriers, Oranges, and Coming into the Country—will feel especially fulfilled by McPhee’s discussions of the specifics from his many books.
A superb book about doing his job by a master of his craft.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-374-14274-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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