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 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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