The Digest Diet

By Liz Vaccariello

New York, Reader’s Digest, 2012

318 pages     Nonfiction

The Shortlist

Liz Vaccariello is the Editor-in-Chief of Reader’s Digest and is the author of several other diet books. The Digest Diet has a lot going for it. It has large print, good advice, great recipes, and a diet that is very simple to follow. 

What I have learned from my own recent dieting is that if I can get through the first three days with very few carbohydrates, I am good for the long run. The Digest Diet has a very simple plan for getting through these first three days, with what Vaccariello calls the Fast Release. Shakes and soups lead to fast, early weight loss while giving you solid nutrition. The soup recipes are especially appealing. I made the Hearty Mexican Chicken Soup and the Italian Shrimp and Vegetable Soup. Both were excellent.

The other two parts of the diet include the Fade Away and the Finish Strong portions of the diet. The plan is designed to last for 21 days, although it looked to me like the Finish Strong portion could last indefinitely. The recipes are excellent. We had the Shrimp Scampi and the Tri-color Frittata last week. Each recipe has a full-page picture to go with it.

One of the things that I have been conscientiously trying to do with our new eating plan is to count calories and carbohydrates. So, I was especially pleased with the Shrimp Scampi recipe. In our no-holds-barred high-calorie days, we liked pasta with shrimp and Alfredo sauce. I put the shrimp scampi from the Digest Diet on spaghetti squash and eliminated about 500 calories per serving, and we thought it was great.

Vaccarriello offers advice as to why weight creeps up on us, a plan for moving more, and a maintenance plan. Although much of this advice has been reiterated in diet book after diet book, it is very plainly stated in The Digest Diet. This is an easy to follow diet with very good advice.

My husband always says that if you can keep up a good habit (whatever it may be) for three weeks, you will be able to maintain that habit. The Digest Diet is a 21-day plan (three weeks) to help break the old, bad habits, and establish the new, good habits to break the high calorie, high carbohydrate lifestyle that many of us have established.

The publicist sent me this book. I am glad that I read it. We love the recipes.

The diet’s website: http://www.digestdiet.com/

Here is a blog posting from a woman who completed three weeks on the Digest Diet and lost significant weight: http://www.annagainandagainreviews.com/2012/04/digest-diet-week-3.html

A review of the book from a diet review website concludes:   The Digest Diet appears to have everything needed for a weight loss jump start with delicious foods and effective exercise. This program allows you to some weight quickly to stay motivated and continue until you reach your goal. The evidence for the effectiveness of this program is solid and the advice leads you to healthy eating. http://www.dietsinreview.com/diets/the-digest-diet/

Started Early, Took My Dog

By Kate Atkinson

Boston, Back Bay Books, 2011

400 pages     Fiction

The first time I read one of Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie mysteries, I was in love. Started Early, Took My Dog is the fourth time that Jackson Brodie has met a bunch of unique women and solved some difficult crimes related to those women. Now that Jason Isaacs is playing Jackson Brodie on BBC, we even know what he looks like, although Isaacs may be more handsome than I imagined Jackson Brodie to be. Atkinson has two things going for her in the Jackson Brodie mysteries: Jackson Brodie is a very interesting, conflicted character and the women he runs into are feisty and colorful. 

Started Early, Took My Dog is messy. Brodie is in a rather bad state; he has been running from himself for several months even as he searches for his ex-wife who stole all his money. He is in Leeds in Yorkshire “searching for the lost pastoral England that was lodged in his head and his heart” when he is hired by a woman in New Zealand to find her British mother. While he searches for his ex-wife, he is also searching for the lost mother. It appears that the New Zealand woman is somehow tied to a woman that may have been murdered by the Yorkshire Ripper in the 1970s. But how does the old lady actress fit into the puzzle? And the woman police sergeant who has just bought a little girl from a prostitute and is running for her life? 

And then there is the dog. Jackson has two children including a teen aged daughter who has occasionally gone with her father on his escapades, but in this book she is virtually non-existent except to be worried over. Instead, Jackson has acquired a dog that accompanies him and on one incident saves his life. The dog is just one more complication in an already extremely complicated life.

 

Like all Atkinson mysteries, the pieces eventually fit together, the grisly crimes are resolved, some more satisfactorily than others, and Jackson meanders on. The beauty of Atkinson’s writing is that the characters are just as interesting as the plotting. Jackson Brodie is a great character and no matter how messy the book gets, Jackson seems to survive and bumble his way to a solution. One of the best comments is about the atheistic Jackson. “He missed God. But then who didn’t.”

The reviewer in the Seattle Post: “Reading Atkinson is like working on a puzzle, trying to figure out how she is going to weave it all together, and it is fascinating how she manages to do it-the first few times, anyway.” I felt that way too. Atkinson may be getting a little bit tired of her character. She says as much in an interview published on the Amazon.com website. She tells the interviewer: “I found the Brodie books easy to begin with, and then very difficult to finish. I haven't actually finished with him yet but at the moment he's taking a holiday somewhere restful. I found the new book really hard but I think I'd just run out of steam with the character. I'm writing something completely different at the moment and it's amazing how much energy I have for it and what a relief it feels! I think the next time I re-visit Jackson it will be with that same kind of enthusiasm -- and he (and I) will be all the better for having taken a break from each other!” Now that I have read four of the books and watched 6 hours of the series, I am probably ready to take a break from Jackson Brodie as well.

If you haven’t tried any of the Jackson Brodie novels by Kate Atkinson, it’s high time you delve into them. The Case Histories BBC series is available on Netflix and is quite faithful to the text, although Jackson gets more air time in the television show than he does in the books.

Here are the other Jackson Brodie book titles and my reviews: Case Histories; One Good Turn; and When Will There be Good News.

A couple of good reviews: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/books/review/book-review-started-early-took-my-dog-by-kate-atkinson.html

http://www.seattlepi.com/lifestyle/blogcritics/article/Book-Review-Started-Early-Took-My-Dog-by-Kate-2252417.php#ixzz265irkrbM

The interview on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Started-Early-Took-My-Dog/dp/0316066745/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1347303106&sr=8-1&keywords=started+early+took+my+dog

Yes Chef: A Memoir

By Marcus Samuelsson

New York, Random House, 2012

319 pages     Memoir

Marcus Samuelsson has this to say about being a chef: “We definitely are in the memory business: we are creating a memory with ingredients.” What a noble goal for a career—to make memories with ingredients.

It seems that chefs are the new breed of celebrities. They are everywhere. And now that I have read Marcus Samuelsson’s memoir, Yes Chef,  I see him everywhere. When I got on the airplane last night, his picture was on the brochure of the on-board food for sale. A colleague mentioned that she lived in Harlem. I asked her if she had ever eaten at the Red Rooster, Samuelsson’s restaurant, and she exclaimed, “We live right down the street and we can’t get in—no matter when we arrive--5 pm or 9 pm.” 

Marcus Samuelsson has a remarkable story to tell in his memoir, Yes Chef. He is in his early 40’s, so there is much of his story yet to be told. But, he seems to know that his life story is unique and eventful, and full of resolve, hard work, and what would appear on the surface to be a lot of good luck. But it is a much deeper story than lucky breaks, and Samuelsson acknowledges that his history has informed and guided his career every step of the way. He tells his life story every time he plans a menu or picks a spice to add to a dish. The menu of his restaurant tells his story, from the Ethiopian spices he inserts to the Swedish meatballs that are daily staples to the soul food of the Harlem neighborhood where he currently lives and works.

Samuelsson was born into an Ethiopian tribal family in 1970. When he was a toddler, he, his mother, and his older sister all contracted tuberculosis. In an act of uncompromising heroism, his mother walked 75 miles to the hospital in Addis Ababa with her toddler on her back and her young daughter by the hand. There were thousands of patients awaiting care at the hospital, but somehow that mother found treatment for her children before she died. I am haunted by that mother’s resolve and the magnificent gift given to those children. 

Samuelsson’s childhood took another turn when he and his sister were adopted by a Swedish professional family. He was raised in an atmosphere of love, acceptance, and purpose. He expected to be successful as a Swedish soccer player, but when he was deemed to be too small, he turned all his energies into becoming a chef. He says that throughout his career he continues to honor his birth mother and the family that raised him.

Trained as a classical chef in Switzerland, Samuelsson honed his craft on cruise ships, and other restaurants, where he took every position he was given and attempted to perform that task with great tenacity, no matter how lowly the job, including gathering herbs for the dinner menu at a famous resort. Because he was talented and clever, he was promoted quickly in each job. Finally, he landed a job as a chef at a famous Swedish restaurant in New York called Aquavit. When the head chef died of a heart attack, Samuelsson was chosen to take over the kitchen. Within 5 months, the restaurant was awarded a 3 star rating by the New York Times; Samuelsson was the youngest chef to be so honored.

Since that time, his career has flourished. His new restaurant Red Rooster is a fusion of all the tastes he has cultivated through the years, with a huge helping of the Harlem neighborhood as well. He mentions that early on he realized that classic cooking included ethnic cooking as well; that there was as much integrity in the cooking of his Swedish grandmother or his Ethiopian mother as the finest French chef. He speaks frankly of the difficulties Black chefs have breaking through racial barriers. He says: ““A hundred years ago,” he says, “black men and women had to fight to get out of the kitchen. These days, we have to fight to get in.” In many ways he identifies with the African American experience, but he is also an outsider in that community. One reviewer says, “There’s a kind of alienation, finally, that can come from being an atypical black person. Like Barack Obama, whom he thanks in his acknowledgments, Mr. Samuelsson hasn’t had anything like what could be called a standard black American experience and has sometimes suffered for that reality. He’s too white for some, too black for others.”  Yes Chef tells of a man who knows that he is in the right place in his world, but there is part of him that we don’t know and probably are not supposed to know.

 Last week I edited a dissertation about multicultural education. The author asserted that immigrant students attempt to succeed in school as a way of honoring their parents, who sacrificed much to bring them to the United States. They feel duty-bound to succeed in school. The reader of Yes Chef has the same feeling about Samuelsson. By succeeding in his chosen career, he continues to honor those who sacrificed much to help him succeed. The book is as much about them as it is about him.

Two good reviews in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/29/books/review/yes-chef-a-memoir-by-marcus-samuelsson.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/27/books/yes-chef-by-marcus-samuelsson.html

An interview on the Tavis Smiley show: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/tavissmiley/interviews/chef-marcus-samuelsson/

Clean Break

By David Klein

New York, Broadway Books, 2012

376 Pages     Fiction

Clean Break by David Klein begins with this premise: Can you make a clean break from your dark past and begin anew? It is the story of Celeste Vanek, a wife and mother of a 10-year-old son, Spencer. As the book begins, she is in the process of separating from her husband Adam, who is in rehab for a gambling addiction. The primary reason for her separation, however, is not as much the gambling as the violent streak that Adam has begun to exhibit. Celeste fears for herself and her son. Klein says that the question he asked himself as he was writing Clean Break was “What measures can you take to get someone you once loved to leave you alone?” 

Intersecting with the major plot line is one involving Jake, the CEO of the company where Adam works and Sara a New York City police officer. While their relationship is tangential to the main plot, Jake takes center stage when he tries to stop a violent encounter between Celeste and Adam. His intervention provides the primary plot twist to the story and makes the reader ask the question, “What would you do?”

Clean Break ends with more questions than it answers and with a moral dilemma that has no clear cut solution. Because the reader empathizes with Celeste and her need to protect herself and her child, we are haunted by the decisions she makes in the end. The tone of the conclusion of the book is positive, yet there is an undercurrent that lets us feel that there will never be a “clean break,” and that there is going to be a lot more to the story.

There was a recent murder case in Kalamazoo where a man confessed to his wife that he had killed two people, one before he met her and one while he was married to her. Because of her need to protect herself and her children, she admitted that knowledge to no one. It wasn’t until her 10-year-old daughter ran to a neighbor to say that her father had hit her mother that the police were called and the entire story came to light. This was a couple who were known to members of our family; the wife was a social worker in the community and the husband was a karate master. As I was reading about Celeste and Adam, I couldn’t help thinking about the Kalamazoo family.

Adam’s gambling addiction is skillfully presented; Celeste’s dilemma is quite understandable. The book was well written and the plot moved along nicely. Several moral dilemmas are explored, and I really appreciated that nothing was neatly tied up. Although the book ended on a hopeful note, I am not sure that the right choices were being made and that the hopeful signs might be short-lived. 

I puzzled over the cover of Clean Break for quite a while. The meaning of the snow and ice don’t become clear until the reader is three quarters of the way through the book. Pondering about that became part of the tension as well.

The other novel I read recently that presented a profound moral dilemma was Defending Jacob by William Landay. 

The reviews for Clean Break were favorable on GoodReads: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13154888-clean-break

David Klein’s website: www.bydavidklein.com

An interesting article about Maria Semple

 Maria Semple is the author of Where'd You Go Bernadette, the very funny novel I read last week. The article appeared in Shelf Awareness today, August 24, 2012.

Book Brahmin: Maria Semple

Maria Semple's plan of becoming a novelist or a teacher was derailed when she sold a movie script to 20th Century Fox just after graduation from Barnard. The movie didn't get made, but she moved to Los Angeles. Semple got into TV with a job on Beverly Hills, 90210. Thus began a 15-year career in television, writing for Ellen, Mad About You, Arrested Development and others. Semple's debut novel, This One Is Mine, was published by Little, Brown in December 2008. She moved, with her boyfriend and daughter, to Seattle, where her new novel, Where'd You Go, Bernadette (Little, Brown, August 14, 2012), begins. Semple teaches writing, studies poetry and tries, with mixed results, to stay off the Internet.
On your nightstand now:
The Tools by Phil Stutz and Barry Michels, Dead Stars by Bruce Wagner and Driving Home by Jonathan Raban.
Favorite book when you were a child:
Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh.
Your top five authors:
Jonathan Franzen, Philip Roth, James Salter, Edward St. Aubyn and Barbara Trapido.
Book you've faked reading:
Moby Dick.
Book you're an evangelist for:
When We Were Romans by Matthew Kneale.
Book you've bought for the cover:
I don't think I've ever bought a book for its cover. Weird.
Book that changed your life:
Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
Favorite line from a book:
"Winter, and a man walked into the street, dropped his glasses, and shot a dog. Summer, and he watched his children's heart break. Autumn again, and Boo's children needed him." --from To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Book you most want to read again for the first time:
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov.

The Vitamin D Cure

(Revised Edition)

By James E. Dowd, MD and Diane Stafford

Hoboken, John Wiley & Sons, 2012

288 pages    Nonfiction

The Shortlist

No one can escape all the aches and pains of aging, but we should all do as much as we can to make aging a healthier experience. Recently my husband was told that his vitamin D levels were low. So, he doubled the dosage of Vitamin D he had been taking. After I read The Vitamin D Cure, I did the same. Time will tell. (Actually today was my first day.)

Dr. Dowd makes an argument for increasing the Vitamin D in the ordinary person’s diet, but he makes it truly convincing when he tells about the benefits of Vitamin D in the treatment of high blood pressure, arthritis, diabetes and obesity. He offers scientific evidence, a diet plan with recipes, encouragement for exercise, and a lot of common sense about creating a healthier lifestyle. Adding or increasing Vitamin D is only one part of the equation. He suggests that people eat too many grains and cheeses and don’t get enough magnesium or potassium-rich foods.

.  

He estimates that the recommendations he makes in The Vitamin D Cure will lower the risk of arthritis by about 50 percent. And he says that “vitamin D and a healthy diet represent a real Fountain of Youth. The most prevalent health problems of old age are arthritis, osteoporosis, heart disease, cancer, and dementia, and all of these respond favorably to normalization of vitamin D levels and diet.”

 Dr. James Dowd is a specialist in rheumatology and integrative holistic medicine and has a clinic in Brighton Michigan. He has recently revised The Vitamin D Cure. I was sent a review copy from the publicist. I have to say that I did not read the whole book, hence its placement on my shortlist.

Dr. Dowd’s website: http://www.drjamesdowd.com/

Where'd You Go, Bernadette

by Maria Semple
New York, Little, Brown, 2012
330 pages     Fiction

Finally, a book so absorbing that I read it in one sitting! And it is funny besides! One would think that Maria Semple, a former TV comedy writer, would write a lot of witty dialogue, but instead she chose an epistolary style for Where’d You Go, Bernadette, featuring emails, reports, school memos, and letters. As one reviewer says, “. . .these pieces are strung together so wittily that Ms. Semple’s storytelling is always front and center, in sharp focus. You could stop and pay attention to how apt each new format is, how rarely she repeats herself and how imaginatively she unveils every bit of information. But you would have to stop laughing first.”

 The paper trail tells the story of Bernadette, who moved involuntarily from Los Angeles to Seattle so that her husband, Elgin, could take a job with Microsoft. Bernadette hates Seattle, hates the school her daughter Bee attends, hates Microsoft, hates the weather, and hates her life. She has become agoraphobic and it immobilizes her. It is mid-book before we find out that Bernadette is a genius architect with a McArthur Genius grant, which she has never been able to use. Bee, her daughter, loves and understands her mother and is constantly annoyed with her father, who, as a prominent executive, is seldom home.

Bee is a young genius with straight A’s, or as her school assigns them, straight S’s, which means “surpasses excellence.” Her parents promised her that if she got straight S’s, she could have anything she wanted. She wants a trip to Antarctica. Not something that an agoraphobic mother might be looking forward to. 

Bernadette, husband Elgin, and daughter Bee are sympathetic, albeit crazy characters. Elgin has given the fourth most popular TEDtalk ever. (I was really proud of myself for knowing what TEDtalks are.) He also walks around in sock feet and bikes to work. As in many dysfunctional families, Bee is the stable one, keeping the whole household functioning.

As the plot thickens, the humor thickens as well. I laughed out loud several times. Where'd You Go Bernadette is just zany good fun. The secondary cast of characters is delightful. My favorite character is Manjula Kapoor, who is Bernadette’s personal assistant and lives in India. Bernadette pays her $.75 an hour. Manjula does everything for Bernadette, including buying airplane tickets, supplies for Antarctica, and scamming her out of her identity.

Seattle and Microsoft are characters as well. The book spoofs the Microsoft work-ethic and the nouveau riche that it has created. It also sends up the constant layoffs and re-organizations. The weather in Seattle is a running gag as are all the lifestyle choices the characters make. The high point of the novel occurs because of an argument with a neighbor. The hill around Bernadette’s house is cleared of its blackberries brambles and the whole hill collapses in the rain. A mudslide almost destroys the neighbor’s house right in the middle of the school’s recruitment brunch. A Seattle bookseller said in an interview “In a way, Seattle hasn’t had anyone really do anything that makes it look at itself and laugh.”

For all the craziness, the reader comes to care about Bernadette and her family. When the details unfold, the reader desires to find out why Bernadette vanished and why Bee and Elgin have set out to find her. The Seattle Times reviewer, who loved the book, summed up her review thus: “Semple has a big heart, and possesses that rare ability to skewer, dissect and empathize with her targets, all at the same time.”

I received the book from the publicist. So glad I did. NPR mentioned it on their must-read list of books for the summer. I know you will love the book as much as I did.

Where'd You Go Bernadette has been reviewed a great deal. Here are some reviews published this week:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/16/books/maria-semple-author-of-whered-you-go-bernadette.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/books/whered-you-go-bernadette-a-maria-semple-novel.html?_r=1

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/books/2018874463_br12bernadette.html