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OBSESSED

THE FIGHT AGAINST AMERICA'S (AND MY OWN) FOOD ADDICTION

A motivational, inspirational addition to the ever-expanding library of total-health guidebooks.

The co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe parlays her lifelong preoccupation with food into re-educating an increasingly corpulent nation about smarter eating practices.

Best-selling author and mother of two, Brzezinski (Knowing Your Value: Women, Money, and Getting What You’re Worth, 2011, etc.) honestly discusses her history of food addiction, from teenage years indulging an insatiable urge for junk food in a family of overachievers to early days in her entertainment career binging on the fat and sugar in “hyperprocessed” fare. It’s no surprise to her, she writes, when people immediately draw eye-rolling conclusions based on her outward appearance, dubbing her a “privileged skinny bitch with food issues.” In fact, her past has been one torturous battle after another with food and a lifelong “determination to be thin,” yet it seems the struggle to control her weight and increase her vitality has kept the author surprisingly grounded. Longtime best friend, award-winning news anchor and co-author Smith joins with Brzezinski to share their dietary failures and triumphs in knowledgeable, accessible parlance. The pair also enlists notable media personalities and celebrities to offer their own observations on weight, diet and the obesity epidemic. Among those sharing experiences and fresh perspectives are New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Dr. Nancy Snyderman, Gayle King, Jennifer Hudson and the late author/director Nora Ephron, plus numerous dieting experts and clinical researchers. An additional section advises on how to address food and nutritional balance gracefully and tactfully with children. Brzezinski and Smith's timely message of healthy harmony makes a smart, personalized complement to the brilliant journalistic advocacy of Michael Moss’ Salt Sugar Fat (2013).

A motivational, inspirational addition to the ever-expanding library of total-health guidebooks.

Pub Date: May 7, 2013

ISBN: 978-1-60286-176-3

Page Count: 256

Publisher: Weinstein Books

Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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

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GENGHIS KHAN AND THE MAKING OF THE MODERN WORLD

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”

No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.

A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.

Pub Date: March 2, 2004

ISBN: 0-609-61062-7

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Crown

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003

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