A sometimes-funny book that should be taken with a tablespoon of salt.
The acclaimed, outspoken magician delivers a “book about extreme personal lifestyle changes, written by a…juggler whose only higher education was Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Clown College.”
When Jillette (Every Day Is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No!, 2012, etc.) was told by his doctor that he would need stomach sleeve surgery in six months in order to lose 100 pounds (at 320 pounds, his systolic blood pressure was a frightening 220), he took this warning as permission to "go crazy." To avoid surgery, he sought out his friend Ray Cronise, an entrepreneur and former NASA scientist nicknamed “CrayRay,” shortened from "Crazy Ray,” who put him on a 90-day “hard-core cold and hungry diet.” Jillette provides a day-to-day account of his near-starvation diet—nothing but potatoes for the first two weeks!—and risky weight loss. Readers should not expect a well-researched argument against the unhealthy and potentially deadly American diet; the book is mostly filthy, self-deprecating humor from a self-described “idiot” and “fat fuck.” Jillette was a competitor on Donald Trump's Celebrity Apprentice, and his description of Trump's peculiar, ridiculous coiffure is one of his funnier lines: “hair that looks like cotton candy made of piss.” As in Penn & Teller's stage act, the author is garrulous, rude, refreshingly honest, and sometimes overbearing. There isn't much drama once he reaches his goal weight—he lost an astonishing 74.5 pounds in only 83 days, which was 24.4 percent of his body weight. What follows are mostly tales of what he ordered in restaurants and ate at parties. In the end, Jillette learned that rather than futilely trying to "catch the vibe of the foods he used to love….it's better to just create new comfort foods."
A sometimes-funny book that should be taken with a tablespoon of salt.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4018-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
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 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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