A real-world approach to achieving sustainable weight loss.
A safety trainer and manager shares the 60-day eating and activity plan he created to shed unwanted pounds in this debut health guide.
Sasser (The Good Hand, 2016) says that he tried many ways to lose weight, including hormone injections, but the pounds just wouldn’t stay off. He then realized that “in order to make any real change, I had to find a balance of diet—meaning the foods I ate—and exercise (I didn’t even like the word) that would be sustainable.” In this book, Sasser details the plan he created that allowed him to drop from 223.8 to 194.4 pounds in 60 days. He focuses specifically on his use of a “Food and Activity Tracker,” a grid-oriented tool he developed to capture and chart progress (or lack thereof). He emphasizes the “Nutrition Math” of making better food choices, controlling portions, and limiting sodium and sugar intake. He also prescribes doing at least 30 minutes of physical activity daily, but notes that it doesn’t have to be at a gym: it could be done by walking, dancing, or doing other common activities. He says that he uses the word “activity” instead of “exercise” intentionally for this reason, much as he used the term “incident” instead of “accident” in his safety career. Other elements of his plan (and tracker) urge readers to record weight before having a breakfast of 300 to 500 calories, and to have two low-calorie snacks in addition to regular meals; he also suggests that readers list any daily alcohol intake in a separate column, in order to be fully aware of their extra calories. Overall, Sasser is an appealing, relatable guide to handling the challenges of exercising and eating, particularly when he acknowledges his own fluctuations and missteps, such as an instance in which he quaffed eight light beers in one day, while hanging out at a pool. However, the author’s own, filled-in trackers with accompanying commentary take up too much of this slim book, and readers may sometimes find them wearying. Still, by providing such “evidence,” Sasser does effectively support his contention that “You didn’t put on all the unwanted weight in a day or week, and you are not going to lose all of the unwanted weight in a day or week.”
A real-world approach to achieving sustainable weight loss.Pub Date: July 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4575-3788-2
Page Count: 100
Publisher: Dog Ear
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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