book review

A Book to Make You Think, “Hey, It Ain’t So Bad!”

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I was irresistibly reminded of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s The Long Winter as the cascading news reports have been coming about the coronavirus. It’s so interesting to see the different sources that people are drawn to in responding to bad news. Some want to distance themselves, reading, watching and listening to material as far removed as possible from the real world.

And then there are people like me, who always find it consoling to say, “Well, other people have had it worse.” For some reason, I’m especially drawn to the last days of the Roman Empire. Hey, the Goths haven’t poured into the city, looting and burning! So we don’t have anything to complain about!! And, in concert with about 95 million other people, Jim and I re-watched the movie Contagion this past weekend. I must say, I have some serious issues about the plot, especially on a third watching. Society almost immediately descends into chaos and looting, but then, suddenly, as soon as there’s a vaccine, everyone is lining up perfectly to snort the stuff. (I have no plans to watch it a fourth time; that honor is reserved for Inception.)

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Some Timeless Sensible Eating Advice–from 1934

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Your carriage madam A guide to good: Janet Lane
Image from AbeBooks; follow the link to purchase: https://www.abebooks.com/book-search/title/your-carriage-madam/

Two recent interests have led me to the above source, and I’ll be developing these ideas in further posts. First, I’ve been struck over the past year or so about how important it is to keep your core muscles—your abdominals—pulled in. I realized at some point that I had gotten into the horrible habit of going around with my stomach pooching out. As soon as you allow that to happen, your whole body goes out of alignment. The stomach sticks out, the spine curves too much, the hips (ahem) stick out, and the shoulders and head poke forward. We tend to think that good posture involves throwing our shoulders back, but in reality our shoulders will just hang naturally straight if the rest of the body is carried properly. (And of course last week’s “Happier” podcast with Gretchen Rubin and Liz Craft was all about . . . posture. Once again the stars have aligned. Be sure and listen to that episode; I will just say that I have no intention of doing the exercises they recommend because I have a routine that works for me, but you may find their ideas helpful.)

So I’d been planning to do some videos showing the exercise routine I do and emphasizing the importance of

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The Daniel Diet, Part 2: Evolution of a Fad Diet

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Image by Martin Ludlam from Pixabay

Here’s what happened, as Monk used to say on the old TV show:

As I explained in the previous post, Rick Warren realized that he was fat and out of shape, as were many people in his congregation, in late 2010. According to the NYT article I linked to yesterday, he told his congregation the next Sunday that he needed to lose about 90 pounds (having gained weight at the rate of 2-3 pounds a year for the 30 years he’d been pastor of the church) and that others could join him if they wished. The article doesn’t say what the reaction was on that Sunday. Then we’re told that shortly after Warren’s announcement he was “in Lenox, Mass., for a personal medical visit with Dr. Mark Hyman, a prominent metabolism expert and author of several best-selling books on avoiding chronic disease through healthier living.” I’d like to get some clarification as to why Warren was seeing Hyman, traveling all the way across the country from his home in Lake Forest, California.

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Four Great Books by the Great Michael Pollan

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I first got acquainted with Michael Pollan back when I was trying to be a vegetable gardener as well as a flower gardener and was reading every gardening book I could get my hands on.

Second Nature: A Gardener

Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education was written in 1991; I probably read it 3-4 years later after we bought our first house and I was trying to get do something worthwhile in the yard. Pollan’s book uses his experiences in starting a vegetable garden of his own as a jumping-off point for all sorts of thoughts about how we provide food for ourselves and how a garden shapes the gardener as well as the other way around. I’d recommend it highly if you’re interested in growing anything in the dirt. I have officially taken myself out of the vegetable gardening business, but even so I’d probably enjoy re-reading this book. (How it can be possible that someone can grow flowers successfully but not vegetables is a puzzle, but I seem to fit into that category, so I’ve thrown in the towel. The farmer’s markets around here should be getting some business from me starting soon.)

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What’s the Connection Between Your Brain and Your Stomach?

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The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts that Make Us Overeat by Stephan Guyenet, Ph.D., originally published in 2017, now available in several formats. I accessed the book via Audible.com.

This is a book that mixes immensely practical, down-to-earth information and advice about our current diet and health issues with somewhat-technical information about the actual biology of the brain. I found some of the biological sections to be rather frustrating, as Guyenet seems to subscribe to the idea that all of our thoughts, desires, motivations, decisions and choices can be boiled down to biochemical reactions at the cellular level. So in an early chapter he goes into an explanation about how our “lizard” brain (or, in this book, our “lamprey” brain) functions, with “feedback loops” putting in “bids.” Guyenet is careful to say that whole process is how scientists understand this all might work, as there’s no way

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A Weighty Book on a Weighty Subject that You Should Totally Read

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The Elephant in the Room: One Fat Man’s Quest to Get Smaller in a Growing America by Tommy Tomlinson, 2019, available in several formats. I strongly recommend the audiobook version, as Tomlinson reads it himself and has a very distinctive voice stemming from his surgery for throat cancer over a decade ago. The voice adds to the whole experience. (Amazon Affiliate link)

I hope that Tommy Tomlinson makes a million dollars net profit after taxes from this book, and I did my part by buying the audiobook instead of putting it on hold at the library. The book is actually several genres in one, any one of which would be worth the purchase price:

1) It’s a vibrant, beautifully-written and meticulous memoir of a childhood in the Deep South. Tomlinson’s parents are descended from sharecroppers (whom we tend to think of as 

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A Family’s Hilariously-Written No-Sugar Memoir

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Year of No Sugar: A Memoir by Eve Schaub, first published 2014.  I read this book way back in 2014, having seen it on the new-book shelves at our local library. It had a catchy cover, and I was just getting awakened (awoke?) to how high my sugar consumption was and how I needed to cut down. So I thought the book might help me with my own struggles. But I have to say that I didn’t enjoy it much. I remember skimming parts and thinking that the book was losing steam as it went on. I ended up getting the book Sweet Poison by David Gillespie that had kicked off the Schaub’s family project and writing about it.

Then somehow last week I ran across the book again and checked out the Kindle version. This time I enjoyed it thoroughly, laughing out loud several times a chapter. Eve Schaub is a very, very funny woman with a gift for ridiculous similes. I have no idea why I didn’t care for the book the first time around. Maybe I’m just more attuned now to this whole idea of severely limiting sugar in our diet than I was back then. Who knows?

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Listen to Michelle Obama’s Memoir as You Cook!

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Becoming by Michelle Obama

I’ve always had a soft spot for Michelle Obama. A First Lady with sass and class, I thought. I never voted for her husband, but that’s okay. You don’t have to agree with someone politically to like that person. So when I started hearing about the tremendous buzz that her new memoir, Becoming, was generating, I decided to use my Audible.com credit for the month to get it right away. (As of the very moment I’m writing this post, there are 332 holds on 15 copies of the downloadable audiobook in the Arapahoe Library system.) She reads it herself, so I got an extra layer of exposure to her as I listened.

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How to Listen to the Real Experts

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The Death of Expertise: The Campaign against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters by Tom Nichols, professor at the U.S. Naval War College and foreign policy analyst, available in various formats.

I try to keep politics off of this blog (but you can head over to Intentional Conservative or my personal Facebook page to read what I have to say on the current state of affairs). I will just explain here that I got acquainted with Tom Nichols when I first started reading about the upcoming election in the spring/summer of 2016. He showed up in this article on The Federalist Blog (which is not the same as The Federalist Society, btw). Wow, I thought, What clarity, and what courage. I’ve been following him ever since. He suspended his blog about a year ago and he writes very few articles these days, but man! Whenever he does so I am so on it. I also periodically go onto his Twitter account when I feel the need for a blast of fresh air and common sense. He’s one of those people who gets attacked from all sides, so he must be doing something right—right?

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Twists and Turns of a Bald-Faced Liar

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Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou, Knopf, 2018.

Well! Recently on the Happier podcast Liz mentioned that she had just read a fascinating book and she was buttonholing everyone she knows and insisting that they read it too. It sounded so good that I figured maybe I should take a look, especially since Liz is in the midst of producing a new TV series and barely has time to breathe. If she read it, well, it must be worth a look, I thought. My new month’s Audible credit was in place, so I decided to go ahead and use that. Wow. I was absolutely entranced and stayed so to the very end. The audiobook is voiced by a great reader, by the way.

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