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
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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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