A straightforward memoir of struggling with obesity and finding inspiration from the founder of Weight Watchers.
Parallel stories of a woman on Weight Watchers and the life of the woman who created the diet program.
When New Yorker and New York Times contributor Meltzer (Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, 2010, etc.) came across the obituary for Jean Nidetch (1923-2015), the housewife who invented Weight Watchers, she decided she wanted to join the program and to learn more about Nidetch. As the author writes, she has struggled with her weight since she was a small child, and she was intrigued to learn how Nidetch overcame her own issues and created the internationally known diet program. Meltzer interweaves her story of weight gain and loss with that of Nidetch. The combination creates an informative picture of what life is like for obese women who constantly obsess about food. Nidetch’s biggest downfall was eating boxes of chocolate-covered marshmallow cookies in the bathroom where no one could see her. It took an incident at the grocery store, when she was mistakenly identified as pregnant, to set her on the track to creating Weight Watchers. “To say that it was a moment that she would never forget,” writes Meltzer, “that would define and transform the rest of her life, is an understatement.” The author followed the program for a year and offers details about each month. She tried out various meetings but quickly got bored with her meals and eating only her allocated points for the day. Meltzer also discusses other diet plans, her struggles with finding men in her life who accepted her without judgment, and the frustrations she felt that her weight often defined her in other people’s eyes before they got to know her. Her story will resonate with readers who have struggled with weight and body image issues.
A straightforward memoir of struggling with obesity and finding inspiration from the founder of Weight Watchers.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-41400-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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 wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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