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 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
SEEN & HEARD
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