A motivational, inspirational addition to the ever-expanding library of total-health guidebooks.
The co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe parlays her lifelong preoccupation with food into re-educating an increasingly corpulent nation about smarter eating practices.
Best-selling author and mother of two, Brzezinski (Knowing Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You’re Worth, 2011, etc.) honestly discusses her history of food addiction, from teenage years indulging an insatiable urge for junk food in a family of overachievers to early days in her entertainment career binging on the fat and sugar in “hyperprocessed” fare. It’s no surprise to her, she writes, when people immediately draw eye-rolling conclusions based on her outward appearance, dubbing her a “privileged skinny bitch with food issues.” In fact, her past has been one torturous battle after another with food and a lifelong “determination to be thin,” yet it seems the struggle to control her weight and increase her vitality has kept the author surprisingly grounded. Longtime best friend, award-winning news anchor and co-author Smith joins with Brzezinski to share their dietary failures and triumphs in knowledgeable, accessible parlance. The pair also enlists notable media personalities and celebrities to offer their own observations on weight, diet and the obesity epidemic. Among those sharing experiences and fresh perspectives are New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, Gayle King, Jennifer Hudson and the late author/director Nora Ephron, plus numerous dieting experts and clinical researchers. An additional section advises on how to address food and nutritional balance gracefully and tactfully with children. Brzezinski and Smith's timely message of healthy harmony makes a smart, personalized complement to the brilliant journalistic advocacy of Michael Moss’ Salt Sugar Fat (2013).
A motivational, inspirational addition to the ever-expanding library of total-health guidebooks.Pub Date: May 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60286-176-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
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
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