A less-than-gripping but still inspirational debut.
Formerly fat-bottomed girl makes her rocking world go ’round.
Beginning early in childhood, Blech found food a vital source of comfort and pleasure. Unfortunately, we’re not talking fruits and veggies—she gravitated toward ice cream, pastries and chips. By the time she turned 35, she was a binge-eater whose weight couldn’t be measured on a standard bathroom scale. Low self-esteem made it all but impossible for her to maintain a love affair; for a while her most fulfilling relationship was based solely on phone sex. After a physical at which she tipped the doctor’s scale at 444 pounds, she headed down to a weight-loss clinic in Durham, N.C., where she began a remarkable two-and-a-half year transformation. Thanks to the clinic’s “Rice Diet,” she dropped approximately 250 pounds without having gastric bypass surgery, eventually bagged herself a husband and, most importantly, regained her health, her well-being and her figure. A solid, albeit unspectacular and often long-winded memoirist, Blech has an endearing, earthy sense of humor. (She cheerfully recounts the evening when she demanded that her prospective new boyfriend whisper dirty things to her in Hebrew.) Readers will find themselves rooting almost immediately for someone honest enough to unflinchingly reveal the most embarrassing aspects of weighing 400-plus pounds. But Blech also has a tendency to ramble, and the litany of food she loves grows tiresome, ultimately detracting from the book’s momentum and message. Many of the final 50-or-so pages feature calorie-conscious recipes and motivational lists.
A less-than-gripping but still inspirational debut.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59486-776-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2007
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
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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