A humorous and heartening approach to sobriety.
A guide for women seeking to pursue their dreams without relying on alcohol.
Boulder, Colorado-based Allison is an entrepreneur, author, and business consultant who joined the Juicy AF alcohol-free community in 1999—“a community of like-minded, accomplished women supporting each other in living their best alcohol-free lives.” Since then, she’s aimed to help women in all stages of sobriety to halt the “drinking-remorse-drinking spiral” and embrace joyful futures. Her book effectively shows the hard-hitting and long-lasting impact of alcohol on the lives of people who can’t control their drinking—especially those of high-functioning, high-achieving women who believe that alcoholism mainly affects men. The book is organized into three parts, focusing on assessing one’s current relationship with alcohol, learning how to plan for alcohol-free life, and reimagining a new life from a spiritual standpoint. Allison offers revealing stories about her own struggles with binge-drinking and alcohol addiction as an outwardly successful woman who seemed to “have it all together.” She invites women to ask themselves if alcohol truly serves them, using interactive exercises, and then gives actionable advice for sticky situations, such as how to turn down drinks at stressful gatherings. The book’s latter half details how to apply spiritual laws to one’s life, so that the reinvented version of you has staying power. These laws include lessons on how to visualize one’s path, substitute behaviors, take direct action, practice forgiveness, and find community. Overall, this book is an excellent alcohol-awakening guide for women, including those readers who simply want to take stock of the role that alcohol is currently playing in their lives. The work is consistently positive, fun, and fast-paced, while also applying the pressure that many people need early in their sobriety journeys. It serves a demographic that’s long been underserved in the alcohol-free space, and brings a fresh, dynamic perspective.
A humorous and heartening approach to sobriety.Pub Date: Jan. 10, 2023
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 135
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.
The chef, rapper, and TV host serves up a blustery memoir with lashings of self-help.
“I’ve always had a sick confidence,” writes Bronson, ne Ariyan Arslani. The confidence, he adds, comes from numerous sources: being a New Yorker, and more specifically a New Yorker from Queens; being “short and fucking husky” and still game for a standoff on the basketball court; having strength, stamina, and seemingly no fear. All these things serve him well in the rough-and-tumble youth he describes, all stickball and steroids. Yet another confidence-builder: In the big city, you’ve got to sink or swim. “No one is just accepted—you have to fucking show that you’re able to roll,” he writes. In a narrative steeped in language that would make Lenny Bruce blush, Bronson recounts his sentimental education, schooled by immigrant Italian and Albanian family members and the mean streets, building habits good and bad. The virtue of those habits will depend on your take on modern mores. Bronson writes, for example, of “getting my dick pierced” down in the West Village, then grabbing a pizza and smoking weed. “I always smoke weed freely, always have and always will,” he writes. “I’ll just light a blunt anywhere.” Though he’s gone through the classic experiences of the latter-day stoner, flunking out and getting arrested numerous times, Bronson is a hard charger who’s not afraid to face nearly any challenge—especially, given his physique and genes, the necessity of losing weight: “If you’re husky, you’re always dieting in your mind,” he writes. Though vulgar and boastful, Bronson serves up a model that has plenty of good points, including his growing interest in nature, creativity, and the desire to “leave a legacy for everybody.”
The lessons to draw are obvious: Smoke more dope, eat less meat. Like-minded readers will dig it.Pub Date: April 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-4197-4478-5
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
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
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