The diet/exercise media guru, autobiographically speaking, is sweatin” to the oldies. Millions of overweight Americans (especially older women), adore Simmons for his empathy and for inspiring them on TV, videos (like “Sweatin” to the Oldies”) and mall appearances to eat right and exercise their way to better health. Others, however, can see Simmons as a bit too driven and fawning. This candid book helps nonfans understand, if not like, the author. This “court jester of health” dons his droll, upbeat persona. There are many food jokes, like wishing he were born in Italy, where so many people were “little plum tomatoes and little provolone cheeses,” but he often resembles the clown crying in his makeup trailer. Raised as Milton in New Orleans, Simmons was very attached to his mother, a fan dancer turned cosmetic saleslady, and bitterly feuded with his stay-at-home dad, who had failed in show business. Food “was a religious experience,” and the rotund boy blamed his brother when he raided the refrigerator and even put the family’s house up for sale. Even more troubling traits for this inspirational icon are revealed when he quits Weight Watchers for earning too many pig pins as a weight gainer, refuses to attend his father’s funeral, and calls his housekeeper and six dogs the woman and children in his life. Getting the best revenge on dad, whom he reconciles with to the point of embarrassing him with public kisses, Simmons recounts how (after beating obesity and bulimia) he went from a bit part on General Hospital to his own successful TV show, cook- and diet books, exercise videos, promos of fat-free popcorn at K-mart and buying mansions in Beverly Hills. There are many examples of heroic work to rescue 1,000-pounders and other victims of disease, but many readers will only conclude that Simmons is still crazy and that his love handles are protruding from his tank top. (First printing of 200,000; $400,000 ad/promo; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-57719-356-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
