by Wendie Aston ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 27, 2016
Offbeat, mostly practical guidelines for a healthy pregnancy.
A blogger, certified holistic health coach, and hypnobirthing practitioner offers tips on guaranteeing a healthy pregnancy in her debut.
Aston argues that prospective parents should begin preparing for pregnancy at least three months before conception, and she offers detailed advice on how to achieve that goal. Her chapters cover topics such as diet, feng shui, beauty, and exercise. The diet section goes far beyond the generic, predictable suggestion to eat organic food; it provides lists of specific items to seek out and others to avoid, not just for good health, but to holistically treat pre-existing health problems, such as thyroid issues or high blood sugar. She also includes her recommendations regarding the timing of conception to increase the chances of conceiving a baby of a particular gender. She even includes advice on changing one’s bedroom environment—such as the placement of the bed, for example—along with traditional temperature-taking and chart-keeping tips. As the book’s title suggests, the bulk of Aston’s advice focuses on conception, but she also gives advice regarding pregnancy, childbirth, and the initial postpartum period, particularly regarding breast-feeding and the mother’s recovery. (The author is a practitioner of hypnobirthing, a natural-childbirth method involving relaxation techniques.) Multiple appendices provide recipes, packing and reading lists, recommended websites and documentaries, and a rudimentary index. Aston’s background as a holistic healer deeply informs the content of the book, and although she’s careful to recommend that readers seek a doctor’s advice or approval regarding her advice, her approach won’t appeal to every audience; indeed, the sheer quantity of advice may be off-putting for some. In addition, its suggestions to purchase expensive products seem to take the socio-economic level of parents-to-be for granted. (It also, of course, assumes a planned pregnancy.) Avid list-makers will appreciate the comprehensive lists, however, and her writing style is easy and approachable, without the chatty, overly chummy tone that other pregnancy books fall prey to.
Offbeat, mostly practical guidelines for a healthy pregnancy.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5043-4897-3
Page Count: 202
Publisher: BalboaPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Rebecca Skloot ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2010
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
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edited by Rebecca Skloot and Floyd Skloot
by Bonnie Tsui ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2020
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
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by Bonnie Tsui ; illustrated by Sophie Diao
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by Bonnie Tsui
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