A self-aware, witty exploration of a woman’s body issues.
Novelist and self-help journalist Frankel (I Take This Man, 2007, etc.) chronicles her 30-year addiction to dieting and subsequent “journey out of the waistland.”
After trying 150 different diets, the author made a pact with herself to go on a “Not Diet,” a decidedly forgiving approach to eating based on the theory that she would achieve her goals via moderation and exercise, as long as it involved getting rid of the negative emotions and self-flagellation that characterized her relationship to food. With the aid of a stopwatch, she spent a day counting 263 specific instances of negative thoughts. These thoughts far exceeded those about family, sex or money (which she also tallied), which convinced her of the need for a complete overhaul. Before the Not Diet could work, however, she had to confront the sources of her negative emotions. She started with her “fatphobic” mother, followed by her bully tormentors in junior high school. She explored how a weight-obsessed culture at Mademoiselle, where she worked for years, validated and enhanced her own preoccupations. As part of her self-acceptance process, she posed nude for Self magazine and got a wardrobe makeover from friend Stacy London (of What Not to Wear fame), who helped the author make the connection between looking good and feeling good. Frankel’s attempts to shift her focus toward love, personal success and even the pleasure of food prove galvanizing, and the journey is relevant and even inspiring. Infused with humor and refreshing candor, the book will resonate with anyone who’s counted carbs or tried to subsist on rice cakes and grapefruit.
A self-aware, witty exploration of a woman’s body issues.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37392-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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