Mildly entertaining chick lit with a dash of scholarship to season the obsessiveness.
A memoir by a fitness and lifestyle journalist who “for years…treated my body like a project on my to-do list.”
In her second memoir, Miller (Coming Clean, 2013) focuses on her intense dedication to making herself as svelte as possible. As she admits, she has struggled with a diet addiction and an extreme devotion to counting calories. In this chatty and frank narrative, she chronicles her ups and down, starting with her experiment at age 4 with the Inuit diet that she learned about from Sesame Street. Since then, Miller’s avocation has become her vocation, and her research has exposed her to anthropological studies, 19th-century works on diet and health, and journals on personality and eating disorders. As an insider in the diet science industry, the author was well-aware of the dangers of dieting, but she pursued it anyway. Her job writing health blogs allowed her to be open about her obsession with dieting, which is on full display in this book. She chronicles her desperate attempts to shed pounds before her wedding to a man who worked as a personal trainer, and she shares her anguish when her first pregnancy ended in miscarriage. In the final chapter, it seems that Miller has come to accept her body and is no longer seeking to be impossibly thin, perhaps providing a message for female readers who may also struggle with issues regarding body image. What makes this memoir different from other accounts by women struggling with their weight is that the author knows the science behind it, and woven into the personal story are bits of historical information about changing images of the ideal female form, statistics, and biological and medical facts. Some of this information is helpful, but readers may eventually tire of the author’s fervid focus on what she sees in the mirror.
Mildly entertaining chick lit with a dash of scholarship to season the obsessiveness.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5039-3517-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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