Much too deep contemplation of his navel, even for a skilled writer.
British journalist Leith is a fat man talking, and no jolly Falstaff is he in this confessional binge.
Leith proffers a bellyful of kvetching about his own weight. (Example: “This morning I take a fat shower, squirming around in the suds like an oversized cherub. Fatly, I towel myself dry.”) Most of this memoir of excess poundage is less about the endemic problem and more about his being in a state of fatitude, being bloated, outsized, obese, corpulent, being a tub, a blob, a pudding. Not enjoying it, Leith followed the path forged by Welles, Brando, Belushi and Fatty Arbuckle, guys who certainly lived large. Girl friends come and go in this Niagara of solipsistic, outsize despair, this torrent of fat talk enveloping everything. It’s bellyaching big time as our often witty author grows too big for his Sansabelt britches. Not alone in fatness, he experiences “a small frisson of horrified recognition” as he spies a large lady swaddled in an outfit that “looks like a nomad’s yurt that has been ripped from its moorings in a storm.” Everybody scarfs too many fries, the sugary starch twice steeped in fat. Maybe it all started when humanity switched from hunting to farming all those carbohydrates the late Dr. Atkins railed against. It was in Dr. Atkins’s diet that the author placed faith. Other weight-loss programs, he decided, were merely part of a vast carb conspiracy. No toast or spuds, but rather cheese, steak and eggs, along with the avocado and berries, is what he ate. In place of the carbs, he also partook of coke, booze and painkillers—until he collapsed. Maybe, he figured, the solution lay elsewhere. He interviewed, to no effect, a French philosopher. Eventually, he turned to therapy. Perhaps a bit of pasta along with the 70 or 80 hours of psychotherapy (so far) can ameliorate compulsions acquired long ago.
Much too deep contemplation of his navel, even for a skilled writer.Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2005
ISBN: 1-592-40155-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Gotham Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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
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
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