A good starting place for diet and fitness newbies, but it’s best supplemented by more heavily researched, detailed...
Fondren’s fitness and diet approach is based on her experiences running her Shape Up program in Mississippi.
Fondren begins with a summary of her background. She was one of 13 children in a Vicksburg, Mississippi, family that struggled to put food on the table. After her mother’s death, Fondren became a teenage wife and mother, but the marriage soon ended, and she moved to California. After a string of bank jobs, Fondren relocated to Nevada to join a legal brothel where she met her second husband, Jim. The two became financially secure and eventually moved back to Vicksburg, where Fondren opened a gym called Shape Up Sisters in reaction to her own sister’s death from cancer and obesity. In 2009, Fondren launched the program Shape Up Vicksburg, which helped participants lose a total of 15,000 pounds. She used this experience to develop a diet and fitness plan based on the idea of starting small—cutting calories by making small changes and becoming more active in little ways—as well as a homemade version of the circuit workout. She also includes healthier, lighter recipes for classic Southern dishes. The recipes, however, don’t list nutritional data or even calorie counts, an odd omission in a diet book. Fondren’s approach is somewhat oversimplified, but this is understandable considering her goal is to motivate reluctant women to embrace fitness and smart food choices. Her suggestions for shopping healthy on a budget are clever and helpful, and the “home circuit” fitness plan is a great way for a sedentary person to start working out. Fondren also offers tips for spreading the word to others and for starting a program similar to Shape Up Vicksburg in other communities.
A good starting place for diet and fitness newbies, but it’s best supplemented by more heavily researched, detailed approaches.Pub Date: May 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-1623361440
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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