by Michael Alvear ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2022
A quirky and useful guide to gradually adopting healthier eating habits.
A self-help book on how to achieve sustainable weight loss by eating for pleasure as well as health.
Although this guide’s subject is weight loss, it isn’t a conventional diet book. Instead of prescribing what foods to eat or avoid, health writer Alvear focuses on howto eat, promising to guide readers toward healthier eating habits by borrowing principles and discoveries from the fields of anthropology, physiology, neuroscience, psychology, and biology. He asserts that food manufacturers have contributed to skyrocketing obesity and ill health by manipulating consumers into eating larger amounts of food, even as its taste and nutritional quality plummets. Standard portion sizes have increased dramatically since the early 20th century, the author writes; even dishes and utensils are significantly larger. He discusses how the general public is constantly bombarded with advertising for junk food and fast food, and how messages about “good” and “bad” foods are full of bewildering contradictions. However, he also notes that research into human biology and behavior can point the way to healthy, enjoyable eating without deprivation or guilt. For example, the book notes that strategies that involve quick, drastic changes are sure to backfire, but mindful eating practices that focus on sensory pleasure can make smaller portions more enjoyable and help people to naturally eat less. The author outlines clear, actionable steps for tapering off poor eating habits, substituting better ones, and rebounding from occasional lapses. Some of the detailed techniques, such reducing soda portions a few spoonfuls at a time, seem impractical, as somewhat less gradual tactics would likely be just as effective. Still, the writing is often persuasive, with plenty of humor, as when it calls dieting “the main exhibition at the Museum of Failure.” It also clearly explains challenging terms, such as “systematic sensitization” and “alimentary alliesthesia.” However, specific citations for research studies mentioned in the text would have been helpful.
A quirky and useful guide to gradually adopting healthier eating habits.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 151
Publisher: Woodpecker Media
Review Posted Online: Nov. 11, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Anne Heche ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 24, 2023
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.
The late actor offers a gentle guide for living with more purpose, love, and joy.
Mixing poetry, prescriptive challenges, and elements of memoir, Heche (1969-2022) delivers a narrative that is more encouraging workbook than life story. The author wants to share what she has discovered over the course of a life filled with abuse, advocacy, and uncanny turning points. Her greatest discovery? Love. “Open yourself up to love and transform kindness from a feeling you extend to those around you to actions that you perform for them,” she writes. “Only by caring can we open ourselves up to the universe, and only by opening up to the universe can we fully experience all the wonders that it holds, the greatest of which is love.” Throughout the occasionally overwrought text, Heche is heavy on the concept of care. She wants us to experience joy as she does, and she provides a road map for how to get there. Instead of slinking away from Hollywood and the ridicule that she endured there, Heche found the good and hung on, with Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford starring as particularly shining knights in her story. Some readers may dismiss this material as vapid Hollywood stuff, but Heche’s perspective is an empathetic blend of Buddhism (minimize suffering), dialectical behavioral therapy (tolerating distress), Christianity (do unto others), and pre-Socratic philosophy (sufficient reason). “You’re not out to change the whole world, but to increase the levels of love and kindness in the world, drop by drop,” she writes. “Over time, these actions wear away the coldness, hate, and indifference around us as surely as water slowly wearing away stone.” Readers grieving her loss will take solace knowing that she lived her love-filled life on her own terms. Heche’s business and podcast partner, Heather Duffy, writes the epilogue, closing the book on a life well lived.
A sweet final word from an actor who leaves a legacy of compassion and kindness.Pub Date: Jan. 24, 2023
ISBN: 9781627783316
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Viva Editions
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2023
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by Rebecca Skloot ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2010
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
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