by Sam MacDonald ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 2008
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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 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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