Those curious about the pros and cons of weight loss surgery will find some answers here, though Whitely makes it clear that...
In her early 40s and topping 350 pounds, motivational speaker Whitely (Gorge: My Journey Up Kilimanjaro at 300 Pounds, 2015, etc.) decided that she needed to do something about her weight.
Though proclaimed fit by her doctors and an avid hiker—she had made it up Kilimanjaro twice—the author felt uncomfortable in her body. “My weight defined me and had defined me for years, decades filled with agony and a healthy serving of self-loathing,” she writes. Dieting didn’t work, so she opted for weight loss surgery. Her memoir describes her life before and after the surgery and the stages of decision-making, which included convincing her marathon-running husband that surgery would be the right choice. Though happy about her choice, which allowed her to lose enough weight to be comfortable with exercising again, Whitely doesn't make the process sound unrealistically easy. While the physical adjustment to taking in tiny portions of food comes across as relatively simple, the psychological adjustment was obviously harder, requiring regular visits to a psychologist and constant communication with a support group. More of the memoir is devoted to life before surgery than after. The author raises concerns about her three children and the humiliation she thinks they feel about having a fat, binge-eating mother, as well as her fear that they will inherit her tendency to obesity. Written in brief, punchy chapters, the memoir doesn't stint on exploring the shame that Whitely continually fears regarding the judgment of others, whether she's worrying that a passer-by is silently criticizing her for allowing her daughter to eat a hot dog, embarrassed about using a seat-belt extension on an airplane, or hiring an au pair to do the active things with her kids that she can't do.
Those curious about the pros and cons of weight loss surgery will find some answers here, though Whitely makes it clear that her decision is a personal one and that others might take different paths.Pub Date: July 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-58005-647-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
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