A skillfully told memoir about an arduous weight-loss journey.
Sapiro, in her debut memoir, presents an autobiographical account of her decadeslong struggle with weight loss.
The author’s weight problems began at birth: She arrived premature, a full month earlier than expected, and didn’t gain weight as readily as most newborns. Her grandmother and parents did all they could to fatten her up, which caused her to associate food (and weight gain) with a smiling, encouraging family. By the time she entered second grade, she was far heavier than most girls her age, which opened the door to years of teasing and bullying. Sapiro describes a variety of childhood challenges, from dangerously high blood pressure to dressing-room disappointments. The author’s self-esteem suffered, and she began to eat more for comfort than any other reason. A 23-year-old Sapiro decided to change her life by having gastric bypass surgery, but she received inadequate education and professional guidance afterward, which made it less of a success than she’d hoped it would be. Finally, in middle age, she decided with her husband to improve her health through diet and exercise, and she soon began to notice changes. This account puts a sympathetic face on a condition that’s often demonized in modern society. Sapiro explains the environmental factors that caused her initial weight problems and effectively illustrates how obesity isn’t merely a matter of overeating. She also accepts a portion of the responsibility for her weight difficulties in early adulthood and discusses the stigma of gastric bypass surgery, which some people see as a way to “cheat” on weight loss. As she describes the postoperative work she put into changing her habits, however, she demonstrates that the option was anything but easy. She also helpfully includes sample exercise routines, quick tips and inspirational quotes at the end of the book for readers who might need a push forward.
A skillfully told memoir about an arduous weight-loss journey.Pub Date: July 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490552699
Page Count: 124
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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