Mildly entertaining chick lit with a dash of scholarship to season the obsessiveness.
A memoir by a fitness and lifestyle journalist who “for years…treated my body like a project on my to-do list.”
In her second memoir, Miller (Coming Clean, 2013) focuses on her intense dedication to making herself as svelte as possible. As she admits, she has struggled with a diet addiction and an extreme devotion to counting calories. In this chatty and frank narrative, she chronicles her ups and down, starting with her experiment at age 4 with the Inuit diet that she learned about from Sesame Street. Since then, Miller’s avocation has become her vocation, and her research has exposed her to anthropological studies, 19th-century works on diet and health, and journals on personality and eating disorders. As an insider in the diet science industry, the author was well-aware of the dangers of dieting, but she pursued it anyway. Her job writing health blogs allowed her to be open about her obsession with dieting, which is on full display in this book. She chronicles her desperate attempts to shed pounds before her wedding to a man who worked as a personal trainer, and she shares her anguish when her first pregnancy ended in miscarriage. In the final chapter, it seems that Miller has come to accept her body and is no longer seeking to be impossibly thin, perhaps providing a message for female readers who may also struggle with issues regarding body image. What makes this memoir different from other accounts by women struggling with their weight is that the author knows the science behind it, and woven into the personal story are bits of historical information about changing images of the ideal female form, statistics, and biological and medical facts. Some of this information is helpful, but readers may eventually tire of the author’s fervid focus on what she sees in the mirror.
Mildly entertaining chick lit with a dash of scholarship to season the obsessiveness.Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5039-3517-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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