An invigorating portrait of being down but not out.
How to take control of your finances, your extra weight and your life.
MacDonald is the last candidate anyone would pick to come up with a devastatingly simple destiny-altering strategy. Mainly that's because, as he reveals in his winningly self-castigating memoir, he was an utter screw-up well into his 20s. A high-school athlete and Ivy League grad, by 2000 he was a grievously overweight, dangerously indebted and chronically underemployed barfly scratching out an existence in Baltimore. Sick of being “a big, fat bastard,” 27-year-old MacDonald developed what he called the Urban Hermit plan, which involved eating no more than 800 calories per day and spending no money. Used to downing dozens of beers each night at his corner bar, he subsisted instead on lentils and cheap canned tuna. Without money, he went on walks and focused on his work. In short order, he was assigned to do a story in Bosnia and was working on a feature article for a national magazine. He lost more than 100 pounds in two and a half months, dug himself out of debt and generally started feeling better. If MacDonald had presented himself as an exemplar of our fat, consumerist society, his book wouldn't work half as well as it does. Instead he smartly traces the outline of a down-and-dirty life that was clawed back from the brink of utter collapse not a moment too soon. His enthusiastic embrace of hard work and strict discipline is inspirational, no less for the rarity of the message. Perhaps the most appealing quality is the author’s awareness of what a foolish example he sets: “Anyone stupid enough to view The Urban Hermit as a diet book and use it as such will probably die of kidney failure. And deservedly so.”
An invigorating portrait of being down but not out.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37699-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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