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
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.
Distinguished natural history writer and explorer Lopez (Outside, 2014, etc.) builds a winning memoir around books, voyages, and biological and anthropological observations.
“Traveling, despite the technological innovations that have brought cultural homogenization to much of the world, helps the curious and attentive itinerant understand how deep the notion goes that one place is never actually like another.” So writes the author, who has made a long career of visiting remote venues such as Antarctica, Greenland, and the lesser known of the Galápagos Islands. From these travels he has extracted truths about the world, such as the fact that places differ as widely as the people who live in them. Even when traveling with scientists from his own culture, Lopez finds differences of perception. On an Arctic island called Skraeling, for instance, he observes that if he and the biologists he is walking with were to encounter a grizzly feeding on a caribou, he would focus on the bear, the scientists on the whole gestalt of bear, caribou, environment; if a native of the place were along, the story would deepen beyond the immediate event, for those who possess Indigenous ways of knowledge, “unlike me…felt no immediate need to resolve it into meaning.” The author’s chapter on talismans—objects taken from his travels, such as “a fist-size piece of raven-black dolerite”—is among the best things he has written. But there are plentiful gems throughout the looping narrative, its episodes constructed from adventures over eight decades: trying to work out a bit of science as a teenager while huddled under the Ponte Vecchio after just having seen Botticelli’s Venus; admiring a swimmer as a septuagenarian while remembering the John Steinbeck whom he’d met as a schoolboy; gazing into the surf over many years’ worth of trips to Cape Foulweather, an Oregon headland named by Capt. James Cook, of whom he writes, achingly, “we no longer seem to be sailing in a time of fixed stars, of accurate chronometers, and of reliable routes.”
Exemplary writing about the world and a welcome gift to readers.Pub Date: March 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-394-58582-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
PROFILES
IN THE NEWS
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.
The chief White House and Washington correspondent for ABC provides a ringside seat to a disaster-ridden Oval Office.
It is Karl to whom we owe the current popularity of a learned Latin term. Questioning chief of staff Mick Mulvaney, he followed up a perhaps inadvertently honest response on the matter of Ukrainian intervention in the electoral campaign by saying, “What you just described is a quid pro quo.” Mulvaney’s reply: “Get over it.” Karl, who has been covering Trump for decades and knows which buttons to push and which to avoid, is not inclined to get over it: He rightly points out that a reporter today “faces a president who seems to have no appreciation or understanding of the First Amendment and the role of a free press in American democracy.” Yet even against a bellicose, untruthful leader, he adds, the press “is not the opposition party.” The author, who keeps his eye on the subject and not in the mirror, writes of Trump’s ability to stage situations, as when he once called Trump out, at an event, for misrepresenting poll results and Trump waited until the camera was off before exploding, “Fucking nasty guy!”—then finished up the interview as if nothing had happened. Trump and his inner circle are also, by Karl’s account, masters of timing, matching negative news such as the revelation that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election with distractions away from Trump—in this case, by pushing hard on the WikiLeaks emails from the Democratic campaign, news of which arrived at the same time. That isn’t to say that they manage people or the nation well; one of the more damning stories in a book full of them concerns former Homeland Security head Kirstjen Nielsen, cut off at the knees even while trying to do Trump’s bidding.
No one’s mind will be changed by Karl’s book, but it’s a valuable report from the scene of an ongoing train wreck.Pub Date: March 31, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5247-4562-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
IN THE NEWS
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