Alison Hood

NonfictionLifestylesFood & DrinkCookbooks

Appetite for Change

Review by Alison Hood

With whole-hearted essays and tempting, approachable recipes, Appetite for Change: Soulful Recipes From a North Minneapolis Kitchen shines with pluck, heart and social consciousness. Influenced by the predominantly Black residents of Minneapolis’s Northside community, the recipes have diverse roots—African, Caribbean, Southern—and were assembled by Northside-based nonprofit, Appetite for Change (AFC).

AFC was co-founded by authors Michelle Horovitz, Tasha Powell and Princess Titus in response to Northside’s troubling history of redlining, poverty and violence as well as the impact of a devastating 2011 tornado, all of which created a food desert with “no place to sit down and be served a meal of fresh ingredients.” The women “gathered friends and neighbors and literally began cooking up change” with cooking classes, gardening projects and AFC’s Breaking Bread Café. Six chapters, each with an essay by AFC co-founders and other AFC staff and volunteers, cover everything from bold vegetables to sweet treats. 

Along with these recipes, Appetite for Change shows the positive social power of growing, preparing and enjoying fresh, wholesome food to nourish body, mind and spirit.

Appetite for Change collects recipes from the predominantly Black residents of Minneapolis’s Northside community, and shows the positive social power of growing, preparing and enjoying fresh, wholesome food.
NonfictionHistoryFood & DrinkAmerican History

Dinner With the President

Review by Alison Hood

Journalist and Julia Child’s grandnephew Alex Prud’homme (My Life in France; The French Chef in America) has crafted a finely balanced, scrupulously researched account of gastronomy and culture, history and politics in Dinner With the President: Food, Politics, and a History of Breaking Bread at the White House.

Even for those of us who paid the barest of attention in history class, Prud’homme’s exceptional writing and good nose for a lively anecdote make the book’s portraits of 26 American presidents vibrant, entertaining and relevant. Food in the White House is both “sustenance and metaphor,” he writes. In a literal sense, these meals reflect the preferences of presidential palates. For example, George H.W. Bush despised broccoli; Barack Obama had a “global palate”; Richard Nixon didn’t care what he ate; Abraham Lincoln loved his cornbread; and Lyndon B. Johnson doted on Texas barbecue. In a broader sense, whatever food is served in the White House influences the nation’s economic, social, cultural and political climate. Food even has the power to bring together disparate parties for productive political debate, such as Thomas Jefferson’s “Dinner Table Bargain” and Jimmy Carter’s Camp David peace brokering efforts between Israel’s Menachem Begin and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. As the late chef and writer Anthony Bourdain put it, “Nothing is more political than food. Nothing.”

Prud’homme also gives credit to the less visible figures who have wielded food’s power, such as the many Black chefs and diverse cooks who have staffed the White House kitchen throughout history. He also shows the powerful influence first ladies have had over the presidential diet and their canny oversight of White House entertaining, from State dinners to receptions and more.

The book’s coda is a short curation of presidential families’ favorite recipes, including Martha Washington’s preserved cherries, Jefferson’s salad with tarragon vinaigrette, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “reverse martini,” Dwight D. Eisenhower’s steak and Lady Bird Johnson’s Pedernales River chili. A captivating epicurean history with a political twist, Dinner With the President is a fascinating look at life in the “People’s House.”

Alex Prud’homme’s exceptional writing and good nose for a lively anecdote make his 26 portraits of American presidents’ appetites vibrant and entertaining.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

This Isn’t Going to End Well

Review by Alison Hood

How well can we ever truly know another person? The exceptional first memoir from novelist Daniel Wallace (Big Fish), This Isn’t Going to End Well: The True Story of a Man I Thought I Knew, explores this question in a way that is simultaneously sharp-edged and loving, honest and painfully haunting.

Wallace’s honed prose and hypnotic pacing carry readers through a layered narrative intertwining the author’s life with those of his friend and brother-in-law William Nealy, his sister Holly and, tangentially, William’s best friend, Edgar. The result is a complicated story of love and loathing and, ultimately, Wallace’s complex deconstruction of his friendship with William after he died by suicide.

Daniel Wallace shares more about his discovery that writing a memoir is “very, very, very hard.”

A talented cartoonist, illustrator, whitewater adventurer and writer, William was a lodestar for Wallace. Their first encounter was during a pool party at Wallace’s childhood home. William was Holly’s 18-year-old boyfriend at the time, and he was perched on their roof, calculating the distance to the swimming pool below. Eventually he jumped through the air, landed in the water, made a huge splash and climbed back onto the roof to do it again. From that moment, the 12-year-old Wallace was “spellbound” by William’s “wildness, the derring-do, his willingness to take flight—literally—into the unknown. . . . He flew, and I, who couldn’t, just watched.”

Over time, Wallace’s relationship with William took root and grew—as a role model, friend, brother-in-law and creative inspiration. “He showed me how it was done: experience, imagine, then create,” Wallace writes. There were road trips across state borders toting illegal drugs, fishing expeditions, raucous rock concerts and other chaotic adventures. Though he was outwardly charismatic, inventive and Clint Eastwood-style macho, William was also Holly’s sensitive and devoted husband, becoming her caretaker as her rheumatoid arthritis worsened.

“But there were two Williams,” Wallace writes. “One was . . . the William we all knew. There was another we didn’t know . . . the William who lived in his own secret room, the narrow confines of an interior life with space for only one, and a much darker space than I’d ever imagined it would be.” It was not until well after William’s tragic death by suicide at age 48 that Wallace discovered a fuller picture of what both drove and tormented William. As Wallace moved through his anger at discovering a version of William he’d never known while William was alive, he gradually realized that even if you cannot fully know another human being, there is at least the possibility that you can, through kindness and self-compassion, know a measure of yourself.

The exceptional first memoir from Big Fish author Daniel Wallace is loving, honest and haunting as it deconstructs his friendship with his late brother-in-law.
NonfictionMemoirHumor

Unreliable Narrator

Review by Alison Hood

The Buddha once said, “Be a lamp unto yourself.” This nugget of wisdom, which came to mind while reading comedian Aparna Nancherla’s collection of memoir-type essays, Unreliable Narrator: Me, Myself, and Impostor Syndrome, may help to provide a reflective frame for readers as they peruse its pages.

The American-born daughter of Indian immigrants, Nancherla has spent years toiling as a writer of comedy and a stand-up comic. But she has always felt fraudulent about being “a so-called comedian” and, at age 40, about having achieved a notable measure of success. Nancherla had tried to cope with her lifelong struggle with low self-worth through remedies such as medications, therapy, meditation and more, but she finally turned to writing to see if that would ease her impostor syndrome and the constant feeling that she is merely “a shadow” self (even though a therapist tells her “ ‘So what if you’re a fraud? Is that the worst thing? At least you’re getting away with it.’ ”).

Nancherla presents honest, intimate, strikingly astute and well-researched essays about her mental state and overall psychological health, but be prepared for intermittent jolts of sarcastic, dark humor that line the author’s trail of self-exploration through her impostor syndrome, or, as she says, “an identity I’ve embraced without question my entire life.” These humorous insertions sometimes have the effect of distracting the reader from the main thrust of Nancherla’s refreshingly insightful commentaries, which put her mental health in broader context through discussions of the internet and social media; the struggles of people of color and immigrants, especially, to assimilate into and be accepted within American culture and society; and the difficulties, hazards and hard-won successes of a life in stand-up comedy.

Overall, the subject of imposter syndrome, beyond a brief treatment in her first chapter (“Now That I’ve Got You Here”), ends up not being the main focus of Nancherla’s journey: It is her deep dive into her interior life that instead takes center stage. However, in her epilogue (“I Tried”), Nancherla reveals what she has learned, through the process of writing, about the nature of epiphanies and how they intersect with an acceptance of being human. Nancherla’s epilogue realization alone makes this first-time memoir a worthy read. It’s an encouragement to those of us (and our numbers are legion) who are beset or traumatized by mental health woes to never give up trying to be “a lamp unto yourself.”

After trying medications, therapy, meditation and more remedies, Nancherla finally turned to writing to see if that would ease her impostor syndrome.
NonfictionMemoirEnvironment

Windfall

Review by Alison Hood

The word windfall conjures images of unanticipated abundance: sweet apples fallen from the tree, ripe for the taking; money unexpectedly found in a coat pocket; or a surprise inheritance of wealth. Erika Bolstad, journalist and former investigative reporter for Climatewire, offers these kinds of unexpected riches in Windfall, a personal family story wrapped in a history of mineral rights, the oil and gas industry, the hard realities for women homesteading in the early 20th century and the American myths of exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny.

This heartfelt, meticulously researched memoir hinges on the author’s great-grandmother Anna Josephine Sletvold, a daughter of Norwegian immigrants who set up a homestead in North Dakota in the early 1900s. In 1907, according to family lore, Anna disappeared. 

More than 100 years later, Bolstad’s mother received a surprise $2,400 check from an oil company—a payment for leasing the mineral rights beneath the surface of the lands where Anna’s homestead once was, at the edge of North Dakota’s profitable Bakken oil fields. She was jubilant. “We could be rich” had been whispered throughout their family history, starting in the early 1950s when North Dakota began its quest for oil, and when Bolstad’s grandparents entered into a lease agreement for royalties on mineral rights.

A short time later, Bolstad’s mother died, leaving behind a mystery that sparked the author’s investigative bent: What exactly had happened to Anna? And was the possibility of riches from oil-related wealth a reality or a chimera? Bolstad writes that this mystery “was my inheritance, my windfall. My story to tell.”

Into the personal fabric of this memoir, in which Bolstad recounts her search for how Anna was “lost,” the author weaves a robust history of the Homestead Act; the rise and fall of the North Dakota oil fields; the often nefarious practices companies employed to make huge profits at the expense of lands, workers and the public; and the political, economic and environmental implications of America’s never-ending quest for energy—and wealth.

With so much urgent concern over climate change and the impacts—environmental, political, economic and social—we humans have on our planet, Windfall is a timely, insightful and important read.

Erika Bolstad’s heartfelt memoir is also a robust discussion of the environmental implications of America’s never-ending quest for energy—and wealth.
NonfictionMemoirFood & Drink

Dinner for One

Review by Alison Hood

Like much of human life, love can be messy. Add in the complications of conducting a very long-distance, mostly digital love affair, and you get a dubious recipe for happily ever after.

Jamaican American Sutanya Dacres was leading a rather humdrum, unsatisfactory life in New York City. Then one night she met a sexy Jewish Algerian Frenchman in a bar. There was instant attraction—but she lived in the Big Apple, he resided in the City of Light, and cultural and racial differences (she’s Black, he’s white) lay in the shadows. Despite these challenges, they sustained a three-year digital courtship until they decided to marry and make a life à deux in Paris. “It was us against the world,” Dacres writes, “and we would move through life’s ups and downs with ease and grace, together.”

In Dinner for One: How Cooking in Paris Saved Me, podcaster Dacres recounts how this fairy-tale romance went sour. Two years into the marriage, the Frenchman left. Now a heartbroken expat—alone, divorced and navigating the complications of being a single Black woman in Paris—Dacres tried to allay her fears, confusion and despair with too much wine and loveless encounters with men. But when “the deep shame that had been bubbling beneath the surface finally erupted,” she writes, “it was clear that I could no longer hide from myself.”

Dacres recounts with self-deprecating, often brutal honesty her journey to understand and connect with her true self. Like a play, Dinner for One is structured with a prologue and successive acts, ending with Dacres’ gradual and passionate awakening to the very French art of cultivating pleasure, self-worth and an appreciation for well-conceived, delicious food. When Dacres began to cook for herself in her Montmartre apartment, she formed a healing relationship with food as a means of self-care and growth—a hard-won redemption via the myriad joys of French culture.

Often humorous and uplifting, Dacres’ writing is also a bit uneven in parts, sometimes due to superfluous details or unnecessary dialogue. But her true writer’s talent shines when she relates her forays into the world of French cookery. Overall, Dinner for One is hopeful, salubrious and, like a meal served with love, a balm for the spirit.

Sutanya Dacres’ memoir about recovering from heartbreak in Paris is hopeful, salubrious and, like a meal served with love, a balm for the spirit.
Crafts, Hobbies & Home

Time for a fresh start

Feature by Alison Hood

Your holiday wish list is a mere memory: it's resolution time (yes, another list). So, grab your paper and pencil and crack open any of the following books for minty-fresh, unusual perspectives on retooling your inner and outer worlds.

Dream It. List it. Do It!: How to Live a Bigger & Bolder Life, by journalist Lia Steakley and the editors of 43Things.com, is list-mania at its most entertaining. Based on the popular social networking site, it features themed lists and short "I did it!" stories drawn from site users. There's inspiration for jotting down your own list and jump-starting your life: you may be emboldened to "ride naked on horseback" or, barring that, simply to "clean out your briefcase." Even if you are allergic to list-making, this is a fun book with 43 intriguing and practical goals—from "Develop Supernatural Powers" to "Be More Organized"—and the often wacky suggestions to help you achieve them. Dream It. List It. also gives 10 simple rules for using lists effectively, such as "document your progress." So plant that rooftop garden and reach for the stars.

Feeling adventuresome? Then pick up Keri Smith's How to Be an Explorer of the World: Portable Life Museum. This is an interactive field guide to exploring alleys, sidewalks, neighborhoods, your local library, mountaintops, kitchen cabinets or the garbage dump—wherever your life adventures lead. Smith (Wreck This Journal), an illustrator, offers a uniquely melded artistic cum scientific approach to observing, analyzing and documenting minutia—of ourselves and our manmade and natural worlds. His 59 quirky "explorations" invite readers to be curious; to investigate cracks, smells and splotches; wander aimlessly; and celebrate trees. Full of kicky photomontages and Smith's wobbly line drawings, this field journal can lead readers into brave new worlds.

Women and girls
There are bracing antidotes within the collected essays and aphorisms of Note to Self: 30 Women on Hardship, Humiliation, Heartbreak, and Overcoming It All. This comforting book is the brainchild of editor Andrea Buchanan, who "curates famous quotes . . . snippets of phone conversation, ideas." In her touching introduction, Buchanan relates that all of her collected sayings had a backstory that might offer "joy and comfort and [an] occasional laugh." Thus this book was born, with well-told stories solicited from a diverse group of women, many of them famous. The essays address the "Big Three" of the book's title, along with "Life's Constant Complexities." Each ends with a Post-it-sized "note to self" summarizing the tale's core message. From an actress' humiliation on "Jeopardy," and a housewife's compassionate adoption of a family victimized by Hurricane Katrina, to an activist's grief over her son's tragic death, these stories hold wisdom bites to soothe and heal.

A Year in High Heels: The Girl's Guide to Everything from Jane Austen to the A-list is London fashion writer Camilla Morton's (How to Walk in High Heels) latest literary bling. While this follow-up doesn't exactly fall flat, it does stumble: intending to be a monthly calendar of to-do's for girly fabulousness, it is instead a strangely arranged encyclopedia of historical and cultural trivia with oddly clashing suggestions (January mandates include both detox and imbibing hot toddies!), which might induce migraines in the most determined fashionista. Each chapter opens a new month with an insouciant postcard from fashion pioneers such as Giorgio Armani and Manolo Blahnik, and features a "Muse of the Month" (e.g., Coco Chanel), a "Page Turner" (recommended reading) and a "Foot Note" (short history of a shoe style). Shoehorned in between are quips from Cleopatra, tips on moonwalking and letter-writing. Much of the history and dates to note are geared toward Brits (St. George's birthday), with the occasional sop thrown across the Pond (Mae West's birthday). However, there are universal lessons, such as how to job-hunt (wear heels) and how to be a collector (inherit money). This is a dizzy, often entertaining read—if perused with slightly raised (and well-plucked) eyebrows.

You, you, you
Doctors Michael Roizen and Mehmet Oz present a new book in their YOU series (You: Staying Young; You: On a Diet, etc.), namely, You: Being Beautiful: The Owner's Manual to Inner and Outer Beauty. You: Being Beautiful has the authors' signature (if slightly juvenile) humor, and is a holistic approach to well-being that addresses looking, feeling and being beautiful. "Beauty," they say, ". . . is health." That said, this is not a beauty guide to supermodel makeup tricks; it is a roadmap to beauty via healthy physical and mental habits, starting with a "You-Q" test to measure inner and outer beauty. The narrative is peppered with self-evaluation exercises, informative sidebars and healing tools. Part one leads readers matter-of-factly through the biology of tip-top skin, hair, teeth, finger, toes and figure. Part two focuses on body-mind sensations: energy levels, pain management, mind maladies and work-money issues. The shift here from physical feelings to emotional is slightly clumsy, but serves the book's holistic vision. Part three tackles the biology of love, sexuality and happiness, wrapping up with the "Be-YOU-tiful Plan" to elevate gorgeousness, and an appendix on how to find a good plastic surgeon (just in case).

Something to think about
If your house is crammed with stuff, chances are your cranium is cluttered, too. Organizational guru Peter Walsh returns to clutter-bust your mind in Enough Already! Clearing Mental Clutter to Become the Best You, coming in March. "If you have ever tripped and fallen on your own belongings," he says, "then imagine what the clutter in your head is doing to you." Walsh constantly sees that lack of clear vision causes chaos in relationships, careers, finances, health and spirits, and he preaches using imagination to create a vision of your desired life, to identify and clear obstacles and to realize that vision. Walsh includes a wealth of commonsense discussion; systematic support material, such as "you are not alone" stories; self-evaluation quizzes to pinpoint life goals and obstacles; and action-oriented checklists and tips. Often, we know what we don't want in our lives, but cannot focus on that which we do. Clear space, Walsh advises, for "if you don't clear room to walk, you'll never find the path to your dreams."

Saucy seafood bites back at life
Lady-killer crustacean, Pepe the King Prawn, dispenses spicy sagacity in It's Hard Out Here for a Shrimp: Life, Love, and Living Large. If you're a Muppets fan (and you know you are), or if you need smooth talk on love, work and the social scene, Pepe's your go-to guy—um, prawn. A salute from fellow Muppet Kermit the Frog launches this raconteur's manifesto of living "La Vida Pepe" with chapters covering parties, love and money, family and friends, work, politics, therapy, style and stress. There's a slightly wicked how-to here for every eventuality, from using the perfect pickup line on "the womens" ("Is it me, or are you hot in here?") to coping with annoyances, like trips to the post office ("If you can't do the time, don't wait in line"). My favorite Pepe-ism extols meditation: "A deep spiritual experience or an excuse to take a nap. Either way you win, okay.

Your holiday wish list is a mere memory: it's resolution time (yes, another list). So, grab your paper and pencil and crack open any of the following books for minty-fresh, unusual perspectives on retooling your inner and outer worlds.

Dream It. List it. Do It!: How…

Religion & Spirituality

Enduring gifts of faith and hope

Feature by Alison Hood

In our conspicuously consumer-oriented culture, we can sometimes lose sight of the deeper roots of the holiday season. The minute October ticks over into November, a dizzying array of tantalizing items are dangled before us, reminding us of a December 25th deadline. Here, we offer an antidote: a calming tonic in the form of four new books that reflect segments of America’s rich diversity of spiritual traditions.

A YEAR OF PRAYER
Germaine Copeland is passionate about prayer. The author of Prayers That Avail Much, this dedicated counselor and prayer advocate has crafted a day-by-day devotional, 365 Days to a Prayer-Filled Life, that aims to move the human perception of prayer as an act of asking-waiting-receiving into a more powerful vision: a deeper and more intimate relationship with God. Beginning with a herald to the New Year, Day 1 invites us to begin anew and let go of the past through a small conversational essay, followed by a thoughtful prayer—a direct conversation with God—along with related Scripture references and a suggested Bible reading. Each day of the year presents a different topic—on a Tuesday, it could be a snippet about marriage, and Friday might prompt you to think about what really constitutes an abundant life. Gentle and steadfast, Copeland’s kind presence and true devotion to a merciful Divine Father shine from each page of this guiding “prayer book.”

THE BASICS OF JUDAISM
Tradition! Yes, that familiar refrain from Fiddler on the Roof kept running through my head as I hummed “If I Were a Rich Man” and chuckled (very hard to do simultaneously) while reading The Big Jewish Book for Jews: Everything You Need to Know to Be a Really Jewish Jew by humorists Ellis Weiner and Barbara Davilman. The authors of Yiddish with Dick and Jane are back with everything everyone—Jews and non-Jews alike—needs to know about how to be “really Jewish.” All of their wisecracking humor aside, Weiner and Davilman have a clear concern: that Judaism is becoming endangered within today’s modern American culture. “There is not one facet of American life in which Jews have not made significant contributions. . . . But this very success threatens to bring about the undoing of American Jewishness itself.” Their solution is to reassert the sense of what “it really means to be Jewish” by “preserving practices and beliefs . . . lest they atrophy . . . or become entirely forgotten.” Fifty-three “lessons” (what, you wanted more?) instruct us on the essentials: how to make chopped liver, how to use the Bible to tell if your wife is cheating on you, how to make pickles, how to worry and how to give back-handed compliments. There’s a lot of information here (plus enlivening illustrations), maybe even a surfeit, but not enough to make you meshugeneh.

BLESSED MOTHER
Writer Judith Dupré (author of Skyscrapers, Bridges, Churches and Monuments), who has a longstanding interest in the beauty of and deeper meanings inherent in architecture, has carefully built a luminous book: Full of Grace: Encountering Mary in Faith, Art, and Life. If compared to an edifice, this would be a simple, intimate yet soaring light-filled space—an apt dwelling for a woman whom many call the Queen of Heaven.

The wonder and mystery of Mary, the mother of Jesus, has long captivated our culture and collective imagination. To this day, hordes of pilgrims converge upon holy sites, places where Mary is said to have appeared, to receive her gentle but powerful wisdom, healing and grace. Dupré explores these locales and the overall fascination with the young girl from Nazareth in 59 exquisite essays (the number of beads on a rosary) that are by turns personal, historical and meditative while they focus on the epochs and experiences of Mary’s life, from her immaculate conception through to her death. Along with Dupré’s keen insight into her own faith and thorough research, the text is enhanced with meticulously chosen artwork, both classical and contemporary, and “marginalia,” consisting of poems, prayers and historical notes.

Dupré takes us along on a journey of faith toward understanding Mary’s universal embodiment and allure, and how this tender, tragic and brave woman’s life still resonates powerfully with women and men the world over. Says Dupré of this power: “Mary’s experiences as a mother, her intense joy as well as her unfathomable grief, shed light on the unavoidable fate of all parents—to love but lack the ability to ever fully understand, or protect, their children.”

SPIRITUAL SELF-PORTRAIT
Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama and the spiritual leader of Tibet who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, often comments that he is “no one special.” He says this to emphasize our common humanity and the “vital need for affection” that exists within us all. This simple statement, which gives a fathoms-deep glimpse into the heart and mind of the Dalai Lama, leads off a new memoir (collected by his translator and friend Sofia Stril-Rever), My Spiritual Journey.

Organized into three parts, the book follows the Dalai Lama’s life experiences “as a human being,” “as a Buddhist monk” and “as the Dalai Lama.” A compilation of his memories, personal reflections, dharma lectures and public presentations, the book is a series of short essays, which are accompanied by commentary from Stril-Rever. Here are peeks inside the Dalai Lama’s experiences as a child, exploring the vast spread of rooms and spaces in the Potala Palace, along with remembrances of persecution and his flight into exile. He gives a loving portrait of his mother (“a compassionate woman”) and declares his vow to, with his last breath, “practice compassion.” The book is a treasure trove for both those who are well-versed in the Dalai Lama’s teachings and those new to this “simple Buddhist monk.” His reminiscences and perceptions about humanity’s need to collectively care for one another and the Earth shine with humor, honesty and kindness—all the while exhorting us gently to “never lose hope!”

In our conspicuously consumer-oriented culture, we can sometimes lose sight of the deeper roots of the holiday season. The minute October ticks over into November, a dizzying array of tantalizing items are dangled before us, reminding us of a December 25th deadline. Here, we offer…

Use the new year to launch a new fitness routine

Feature by Alison Hood

The New Year is here—it's time for a fresh start! How about a fitter, happier you in 2004? Several new fitness books, each brimming with the latest nutrition and exercise research, offer positive, powerful tools for achieving glowing good health.

Fitness consultant Dr. Gabe Mirkin pampers the body's hardest working muscle in The Healthy Heart Miracle. This handbook holds a dramatic newsflash: heart health can improve in just two weeks with simple changes in diet and exercise habits. Mirkin's DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) Plus ("plus" equals exercise) program promotes the consumption of whole grains, beans, fruits and vegetables. Mirkin says his plan, an eight-week journey toward permanent lifestyle change, can prevent heart attack, diabetes, stroke and premature aging. Chapters discuss the specifics of hypertension and show how to avoid or reverse it using DASH. Helpful sidebars offer tips on fitness, diet and supplements, exercise and disease prevention. Appendices give shopping lists, menu plans, uncomplicated recipes and worksheets for tracking progress. This easily navigable road map charts a steady path to a stronger, healthier heart.

Nutrient knockouts
Broccoli, blueberries and soy . . . oh my! Dr. Steven Pratt and Kathy Matthews present their powerhouse prescription in SuperFoods Rx. Fourteen "super" foods each pack a hefty nutrient wallop that works synergistically to reduce heart disease, diabetes and cancer. Add regular exercise, sufficient rest and fluid intake, positive socializing and stress management, and the blueprint for health is complete. This compendium gives uncomplicated eating guidelines and devotes individual chapters to the eatables on the SuperFoods list. There is nutrition information on each specific food from salmon to spinach an explanation of its health benefits and suggestions for incorporating it into your daily diet. The book's bibliography is impressive; read a fraction of the material and you'll be nutrition-savvy in no time.

Don't sweat it
So, you're eating more veggies and fewer Krispy Kremes. But what's missing? Exercise, of course! To the rescue is Quick Fit: The Complete 15-Minute No-Sweat Workout by fitness consultant Richard Bradley. He solves the problem of squeezing a workout into your crowded day with an easy exercise plan for healthy but sedentary adults. This workout features a moderate 15-minute mix of aerobic activity, strength training and stretches that can be done anywhere in any attire. Quick Fit's friendly approach extols the benefits of physical fitness, demystifies our reluctance to exercise and offers inspiring motivational tips and testimonials. There's basic advice on hand weights and athletic shoes, creative suggestions to keep new exercisers enthused and ways to tailor the plan to time constraints or new fitness goals.

On top of the world
Joe Decker was overweight, addicted and totally out of shape. Now called "The World's Fittest Man," he presents his story and a four-week fitness plan in The World's Fittest You: Four Weeks to Total Fitness, written with Eric Neuhaus. Decker's upbeat attitude informs this positive, carefully calibrated diet and exercise program, adaptable for folks of all shapes, sizes and fitness levels. He believes that success lies in making small changes slowly, in self-knowledge and in goal-setting. Fittest You states that eating right not dieting is empowering, and touts the "FIT" technique, a workout based on the latest exercise research, that "shocks" your body into shape with varied cardio, strength training and flexibility routines. The book has a diet, fitness and medical self-inventory, FIT instruction and a 28-day exercise/eating plan. Illustrated appendices show cardio, strength and stretching moves that can be done in the gym or at home.

The wholistic approach
Complete fitness, believes trainer Steve Ilg, is flexing your muscles and your mind. "Don't just work out, work within," he instructs in Total Body Transformation: A 3-Month Personal Fitness Prescription for a Strong, Lean Body and a Calmer Mind. This unusual program, "Wholistic Fitness," combines yoga with cardio and strength training, and is aimed at regular exercisers, athletes and the super fit. But whatever your fitness level, this reflective approach can enrich the spirit, stimulating physical and emotional health.

 

Alison Hood writes from California, land of the super fit, where she sneaks chocolate and pretends to like tofu.

The New Year is here—it's time for a fresh start! How about a fitter, happier you in 2004? Several new fitness books, each brimming with the latest nutrition and exercise research, offer positive, powerful tools for achieving glowing good health.

Nonfiction

Inside an art history mystery

Review by Alison Hood

If the summer fiction offerings aren’t tempting enough to tote to the seaside, pick up Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by husband-and-wife journalists Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo. This is the incredible, gripping story of British con man John Drewe and his partner in deception, art forger John Myatt. It is nonfiction, but its hair-raising investigative reporting reads like a thriller that just might knock you right out of your beach chair.

Provenance is a masterpiece of research fashioned into a well-written, tautly paced tale of a strange scandal in the art world. For nearly 10 years, “Professor” John Drewe, a truly self-invented man who laid claim to many names and occupations (including physicist), pulled off a complex, twisted art fraud that involved forgery—not only of paintings, but also of their provenance. Provenance, in the art world, is the record of ownership—aka the “paper trail”—of an artwork from the minute it leaves the artist’s hands.

The cast of characters in this drama is broad: the book begins with a list of the dramatis personae, which includes Drewe and Myatt (the main perpetrators) and extends to museum archivists, art dealers, Scotland Yard art and antiques squad detectives, and a host of innocent bystanders.

John Drewe was brilliant. He also was a charismatic (and dangerous) psychopathic liar with an uncanny ability to pick up downtrodden individuals, like struggling artist John Myatt, and bend them to do his bidding. He conned Myatt into creating fake paintings in the style of modern masters, such as Giacometti and Ben Nicholson. Often, these paintings were truly poor imitations—a sad fact that led Drewe to do a little forging of his own: he made individual pieces of provenance to authenticate the fakes. Charming his way into the higher echelons of the international and British art worlds, Drewe gained access to prominent museum archives, like the Tate, both stealing from and altering their formerly sacrosanct records. The results were chaotic, cataclysmic and downright murderous—not your typical day at the beach.

Alison Hood writes from Marin County, California.

If the summer fiction offerings aren’t tempting enough to tote to the seaside, pick up Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by husband-and-wife journalists Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo. This is the incredible, gripping story of British…

NonfictionEssaysBody, Mind & Spirit

Yoke

Review by Alison Hood

In the introductory essay of Yoke: My Yoga of Self-Acceptance, Jessamyn Stanley relates the time a reader, who happened to be a freelance editor, found a mistake in the early pages of Stanley’s first book, Every Body Yoga. Stanley was attempting to define the Sanskrit word for yoga, which means “to yoke” or “to join together the light and dark of life, the good and the bad . . . to marry breath, thought, and movement, to connect the body, mind, and spirit.” Instead of writing the word yoke, however, Stanley had inadvertently written yolk. Oops.

Anger and shame ensued—a welter of feelings that propelled Stanley to her yoga mat for some calming breaths. Thus, Yoke was born, a collection of 13 autobiographical essays that are brash (with salty language aplenty), outspoken, funny, insightful, honest and occasionally spiced with dashes of self-deprecating melodrama.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Jessamyn Stanley shares how her guide to the ancient practice of yoga turned out to be deeper and more demanding than she ever imagined.

The essays in Yoke explore Stanley’s belief that “everything is yoga, every day,” and that fully entering yoga/yoke means integrating the light and dark of life with the hardscrabble work of everyday living. “My yoga has many intersections and edges,” she writes, “because like the universe, I’m always unfolding. My yoga is finding out what it means to be a Black queer woman in a world that doesn’t want me to be.” Her reflections on topics such as meditation, imposter syndrome, wealth inequality, racism, cannabis use, sexual abuse and the sacredness of music are heartfelt and often searing. She is strongly declarative, and this makes for a narrative that allows readers to really know this author, which is, after all, what many readers want: connection.

While the writing occasionally meanders or goes a bit off point, any discomfort readers might feel in response to Stanley’s blunt-edged anger can give rise to self-reflection and stir compassion for our collective human frailty and suffering. But this honest chronicle of a journey toward self-acceptance and purpose wraps on a bright note. As Stanley writes, “I’m enough. Exactly as I am right now. I don’t need to know more or do more or be different at all.”

The 13 autobiographical essays in Yoke are brash, outspoken, funny, insightful, honest and occasionally spiced with dashes of self-deprecating melodrama.
NonfictionMemoirFamily & Relationships

I’ll Be Seeing You

Review by Alison Hood

“This book is a diary of my parents’ decline.”

So opens novelist Elizabeth Berg’s new biographic memoir, I’ll Be Seeing You. Yes, her prologue speaks bluntly, but don't be deterred. Though this book does bear witness to the inevitability of aging and loss, it is nonetheless a small gem shining with Berg’s signature largesse—generous gifts of poetic insight, close observance, vulnerability, honesty, humor and grace.

Berg’s father, a tough U.S. Army “lifer,” is in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease, while his wife of more than 67 years tries to cope. Though he's always been autocratic and demanding, Berg’s father unconditionally adores his wife. “She was the place where he put his tenderness,” Berg writes. Eventually, his gradual descent into dementia, along with his wife’s advancing age, force the couple to move from their longtime home into a two-bedroom apartment in an assisted living facility.

Berg and her sister try to negotiate and navigate this upheaval with their parents’ best interests at heart, but complications arise. Their father is increasingly confused and isolated, and their usually even-tempered mother becomes angry—an understandable reaction to her two-pronged grief over losing her husband to dementia and leaving a beloved home. “My mother was enraged," Berg writes. "Her heart was breaking because her house was being taken from her, which is to say that her life was.”

From the fall of 2010 to the summer of 2011, short diary entries focus mainly on the events of Berg’s aging parents’ lives, as the author and her sister step in to be their parents’ loving—and often frustrated—family caregivers. “It’s hard to know how to rescue someone. It’s hard to know how to help them in the way they need to be helped,” she writes in one entry. Such rueful reflections are blended with an appreciation of ordinary moments, making each entry a story in miniature—cameos of the joys and pains of family life, and the challenges and rewards of caregiving for loved ones.

Readers familiar with Berg’s novels know that her stories wonderfully encompass the comforts of beauty and wry humor, but they never sugarcoat life’s hard truths. The same is true of I'll Be Seeing You, which mines the wisdom hidden in difficult times. “Life is a minefield at any age," Berg writes. "If we’re smart, we count our blessings between the darker surprises. When I look at my parents’ lives, I know they were lucky. And still are.”

“This book is a diary of my parents’ decline.”

So opens novelist Elizabeth Berg’s new biographic memoir, I’ll Be Seeing You. Yes, her prologue speaks bluntly, but don't be deterred. Though this book does bear witness to the inevitability of aging and loss, it is nonetheless a small…

NonfictionMemoirFood & Drink

An Onion in my Pocket

Review by Alison Hood

“Recovering” Buddhist priest and “vegetable whisperer” Deborah Madison reveals the heart and mind of the chef behind an iconic San Francisco restaurant and numerous vegetarian cookbooks in her honest, beguiling memoir, An Onion in My Pocket. The title is derived from an opening anecdote: After spending the day making pizza with her ex, Madison attended a Spanish class and, searching her pockets for pen and paper, pulled out an onion leftover from pizza-making and plunked it on her desk. “People started to laugh. To me, it was utterly normal,” she writes.

Madison relays her life in a swingy style, moving from her childhood in Davis, California, to her college days, to her post-college migration to the San Francisco Zen Center amid that city’s counterculture heyday. She lived in the Zen community for 20 years and started her culinary path as their head cook. Later, she did a stint at Alice Waters’ famed Chez Panisse and eventually helped found (then helm) the acclaimed vegetarian restaurant Greens. An Onion in My Pocket offers a layered, intimate look at Zen life, the making of a soulful, artful chef and the genesis and growth of a writer. It’s also an ode to nourishment, sustenance and gratitude for the earth’s bounty, vegetal and otherwise.

“Recovering” Buddhist priest and “vegetable whisperer” Deborah Madison reveals the heart and mind of the chef behind an iconic San Francisco restaurant and numerous vegetarian cookbooks in her honest, beguiling memoir, An Onion in My Pocket. The title is derived from an opening anecdote: After…

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