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
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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