A comprehensive, well-formatted primer for eating and exercising with bodybuilding in mind.
Lee (Lean Gains, 2018) trains the reader in the fundamentals of health and strength in this fitness manual.
Have you ever been on a diet that was working…but then stopped? Or tried to start a workout regimen only to find it ineffective? Lee aims to provide a fresh start when it comes to nutrition and exercise, replacing the many myths that bombard us daily with sound information and sustainable workout habits. He divides his advice into three parts: an explanation of nutrition, an exploration of exercising for muscle growth, and a practical regimen for switching to a healthier, muscle-building program. He explains why diets fail, getting into the biological factors at play when people abstain from or overindulge in various types of food. He dives into the weeds regarding the various nutrients the body needs and what they do; for example, what does it really mean to have a zinc deficiency, anyway? He sets realistic dietary goals for losing or maintaining weight, based on body type and level of activity. In the exercise section, he breaks down the many considerations that go into a fitness routine, including body type—are you an ectomorph, mesomorph, or endomorph? He also discusses the best strategies (and their side effects) for attaining various physiques. (Is it possible to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time? Only in some cases, but being out of shape is one of those cases!) In the final section, Lee outlines several complete workout programs and even includes a music playlist. Numerous charts and full-color photographs augment the text. Lee’s prose is accessible and clear, appropriate to that of a practiced fitness instructor: “Overtraining is a bit like trying to blow up a balloon in one breath. In the beginning, you can blow into the balloon and the balloon will get bigger. However, the longer you continue exhaling into the balloon without taking a break, the smaller the balloon will increase in size and the more exhausted you would become.” The book, a mammoth 800 pages, explores—in granular detail—areas that the beginning bodybuilder may not have previously considered, like the importance of limiting cardio exercises if one is trying to build muscle. Building muscle is the author’s concern, after all, and his nutritional advice—which makes up the first half of the book—unfolds with that goal in mind. There are many books on this subject, but Lee sets himself apart by his willingness to discuss at length numerous supplements, including “the Naughty Stuff”: performance-enhancing drugs. A point in Lee’s favor is that he generally defers to health science and presents things in a balanced manner, providing pros and cons for various diets, supplements, and other possibly controversial elements. Even readers who choose not to follow his advice will gain a bit of muscle mass simply from lifting this weighty tome onto their bookshelf.
A comprehensive, well-formatted primer for eating and exercising with bodybuilding in mind.Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-916410-50-3
Page Count: 786
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 4, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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