A useful, accessible primer for readers hoping to keep themselves looking their best.
A comprehensive self-help guide that gives readers the lowdown on the full spectrum of options for maintaining a youthful appearance.
Plastic surgeon Terry Dubrow (The Acne Cure, 2003) of E!’s TV series Botched and Good Work, and his wife, Heather, an actress and cast member of Bravo’s The Real Housewives of Orange County, offer a comprehensive beauty and anti-aging manual. The book progresses from the least to most drastic approaches to enhancing one’s appearance. Early chapters, for example, offer preventative and reparative advice on makeup, hair care, and skin care; one explains the common ingredients in skin care products, detailing the conditions for which each is suited. From there, the focus shifts to noninvasive aesthetic treatments, such as facials and dermal fillers, and then to plastic surgery. The book clearly outlines the benefits and limitations of each procedure and offers detailed suggestions about choosing a doctor and what to expect during recovery. The final section synthesizes the preceding information to address specific conditions or concerns, ranking topical and nonsurgical treatments according to efficacy and risk. This guide assumes that readers will be familiar with both authors as television personalities and benefits from a conversational, approachable prose style. The information presented is clear and concise and will be valuable to anyone looking to treat or prevent the telltale signs of growing older. The authors advocate a pared-down approach to makeup, but the early sections might have been strengthened by some basic tutorials in this area, including photos or illustrations. Still, the book’s candid discussion of which well-known products and procedures simply don’t work is useful, as are its product recommendations, which range from drugstore bargains to high-end merchandise. It even includes several lesser-known Korean and Japanese brands now available stateside, highlighting an emerging trend in beauty and skin care. Overall, the Dubrows present a refreshing, less-is-more perspective on maintaining a youthful appearance and have crafted a solid information resource.
A useful, accessible primer for readers hoping to keep themselves looking their best.Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-939457-55-4
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Ghost Mountain Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.
A follow-on to the author’s garbled but popular 48 Laws of Power, promising that readers will learn how to win friends and influence people, to say nothing of outfoxing all those “toxic types” out in the world.
Greene (Mastery, 2012, etc.) begins with a big sell, averring that his book “is designed to immerse you in all aspects of human behavior and illuminate its root causes.” To gauge by this fat compendium, human behavior is mostly rotten, a presumption that fits with the author’s neo-Machiavellian program of self-validation and eventual strategic supremacy. The author works to formula: First, state a “law,” such as “confront your dark side” or “know your limits,” the latter of which seems pale compared to the Delphic oracle’s “nothing in excess.” Next, elaborate on that law with what might seem to be as plain as day: “Losing contact with reality, we make irrational decisions. That is why our success often does not last.” One imagines there might be other reasons for the evanescence of glory, but there you go. Finally, spin out a long tutelary yarn, seemingly the longer the better, to shore up the truism—in this case, the cometary rise and fall of one-time Disney CEO Michael Eisner, with the warning, “his fate could easily be yours, albeit most likely on a smaller scale,” which ranks right up there with the fortuneteller’s “I sense that someone you know has died" in orders of probability. It’s enough to inspire a new law: Beware of those who spend too much time telling you what you already know, even when it’s dressed up in fresh-sounding terms. “Continually mix the visceral with the analytic” is the language of a consultant’s report, more important-sounding than “go with your gut but use your head, too.”
The Stoics did much better with the much shorter Enchiridion.Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-525-42814-5
Page Count: 580
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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