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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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