A sometimes-funny book that should be taken with a tablespoon of salt.
The acclaimed, outspoken magician delivers a “book about extreme personal lifestyle changes, written by a…juggler whose only higher education was Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College.”
When Jillette (Every Day Is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No!, 2012, etc.) was told by his doctor that he would need stomach sleeve surgery in six months in order to lose 100 pounds (at 320 pounds, his systolic blood pressure was a frightening 220), he took this warning as permission to "go crazy." To avoid surgery, he sought out his friend Ray Cronise, an entrepreneur and former NASA scientist nicknamed “CrayRay,” shortened from "Crazy Ray,” who put him on a 90-day “hard-core cold and hungry diet.” Jillette provides a day-to-day account of his near-starvation diet—nothing but potatoes for the first two weeks!—and risky weight loss. Readers should not expect a well-researched argument against the unhealthy and potentially deadly American diet; the book is mostly filthy, self-deprecating humor from a self-described “idiot” and “fat fuck.” Jillette was a competitor on Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice, and his description of Trump's peculiar, ridiculous coiffure is one of his funnier lines: “hair that looks like cotton candy made of piss.” As in Penn & Teller's stage act, the author is garrulous, rude, refreshingly honest, and sometimes overbearing. There isn't much drama once he reaches his goal weight—he lost an astonishing 74.5 pounds in only 83 days, which was 24.4 percent of his body weight. What follows are mostly tales of what he ordered in restaurants and ate at parties. In the end, Jillette learned that rather than futilely trying to "catch the vibe of the foods he used to love….it's better to just create new comfort foods."
A sometimes-funny book that should be taken with a tablespoon of salt.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4018-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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