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The Icon and the Idealist

The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
The Icon and the Idealist is a compelling, warts-and-all dual biography of the warring leaders of the early 20th-century birth control movement: Margaret Sanger and Mary Ware Dennett.
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The Power of Fun

The Power of Fun provides instructions for filling your life with the kind of playful, connected fun that leaves you feeling nourished and refreshed.
LifestylesHealth & Fitness

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Fitness for the future This time, it’s going to be different. Think about it. One year from today, you could be 70 pounds lighter and ready for a marathon or triathlon. Whether you’re a beginner who’s new to weight loss and aerobic and strength training, or whether you’ve already made proper diet and exercise a part of your lifestyle, there’s enough information in the following books to motivate and invigorate you over the next 12 months.

Joanie Greggains, author of Fit Happens (Villard, $19.95, 0375500367), focuses on the fundamentals of weight loss and physical fitness by demystifying fad diets and demonstrating that you can make time in your day for fat-burning exercises. She also gives you the latest information on 13 health foods that really aren’t healthy and offers helpful suggestions for handling your food cravings. Greggains believes that losing weight and staying fit are simple processes that anyone can learn. The official Chub Club Coach’s Workout Program that Judy Molnar features in her new book, You Don’t Have to Be Thin to Win (Villard, $19.95, 0375504141), will move you from an unfit to a physically fit person in no time. Molnar transformed her 330-pound body, and at the end of her two-and-a-half year program, began participating in triathlons. The goal of her program is good health and fitness not thinness. She offers strategies for finding a way to exercise that’s right for you and even includes a 12-week marathon training program and an eight-week sprint triathlon training program for beginners who are ready for a new challenge.

The Tae Bo Way by Billy Blanks provides the dynamic blend of martial arts, dance, and boxing that has been called the most energizing workout in America. No matter what your level of physical fitness, you’ll find his program exhilarating and simple to learn. Blanks’s strength is that he motivates as he explains. Will is everything to him, and his message to people of all ages is inspirational. If you have his video workout programs, this book will give you even more information to assist your total body conditioning. Don’t miss this one.

As aerobic and strength training become a part of your life, add Arnold Schwarzenegger’s paperback The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding (Fireside, $25, 0684857219) to your library. Seven-time Mr. Olympia and winner of three Mr. Universe titles, Schwarzenegger has written what is universally recognized as the definitive sourcebook for bodybuilding. You don’t have to be a bodybuilder (or a man) to learn from this pro. Anyone in a simple strength-training program can benefit from this information. The book covers every facet of the sport, and methods of training are outlined to take the novice from early to advanced stages of training. You’ll refer to this book often.

Fitness expert and personal trainer Brad Schoenfeld has written an excellent book for women who want to strengthen, streamline, and shape their bodies. Sculpting Her Body Perfect (Human Kinetics, $19.95, 0736001549) involves a three-step program that is based on the unique needs of women. Loaded with training tips, illustrations, special maintenance programs, and safe workout routines for pregnant women, the book is a perfect guide to sculpting a beautiful physique in ten to 25 minutes, three times a week. This is a good book for women who are just beginning a strength-training program.

Fitness, however, isn’t limited by age. In Slim and Fit Kids: Raising Healthy Children in a Fast-Food World (Health Communications, $12.95, 155874729X), Judy Mazel and John E. Monaco tackle the serious problem of overweight children. Surprisingly, more than 30 per cent of American children are presently overweight, and one in five is considered obese. The authors discuss combining foods to maximize a child’s energy and meet nutritional needs, along with kid-proof recipes and suggestions on how to talk to your child about this sensitive subject. Their 28-day exercise program (designed by a personal trainer) could set your child on the wellness path and perhaps create an interest in fitness that lasts a lifetime.

Pat Regel pumps iron in Nashville.

Fitness for the future This time, it's going to be different. Think about it. One year from today, you could be 70 pounds lighter and ready for a marathon or triathlon. Whether you're a beginner who's new to weight loss and aerobic and strength training,…

LifestylesHealth & Fitness

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Fitness for the future This time, it’s going to be different. Think about it. One year from today, you could be 70 pounds lighter and ready for a marathon or triathlon. Whether you’re a beginner who’s new to weight loss and aerobic and strength training, or whether you’ve already made proper diet and exercise a part of your lifestyle, there’s enough information in the following books to motivate and invigorate you over the next 12 months.

Joanie Greggains, author of Fit Happens, focuses on the fundamentals of weight loss and physical fitness by demystifying fad diets and demonstrating that you can make time in your day for fat-burning exercises. She also gives you the latest information on 13 health foods that really aren’t healthy and offers helpful suggestions for handling your food cravings. Greggains believes that losing weight and staying fit are simple processes that anyone can learn. The official Chub Club Coach’s Workout Program that Judy Molnar features in her new book, You Don’t Have to Be Thin to Win (Villard, $19.95, 0375504141), will move you from an unfit to a physically fit person in no time. Molnar transformed her 330-pound body, and at the end of her two-and-a-half year program, began participating in triathlons. The goal of her program is good health and fitness not thinness. She offers strategies for finding a way to exercise that’s right for you and even includes a 12-week marathon training program and an eight-week sprint triathlon training program for beginners who are ready for a new challenge.

The Tae Bo Way (Bantam, $25, 0553801007) by Billy Blanks provides the dynamic blend of martial arts, dance, and boxing that has been called the most energizing workout in America. No matter what your level of physical fitness, you’ll find his program exhilarating and simple to learn. Blanks’s strength is that he motivates as he explains. Will is everything to him, and his message to people of all ages is inspirational. If you have his video workout programs, this book will give you even more information to assist your total body conditioning. Don’t miss this one.

As aerobic and strength training become a part of your life, add Arnold Schwarzenegger’s paperback The New Encyclopedia of Modern Bodybuilding (Fireside, $25, 0684857219) to your library. Seven-time Mr. Olympia and winner of three Mr. Universe titles, Schwarzenegger has written what is universally recognized as the definitive sourcebook for bodybuilding. You don’t have to be a bodybuilder (or a man) to learn from this pro. Anyone in a simple strength-training program can benefit from this information. The book covers every facet of the sport, and methods of training are outlined to take the novice from early to advanced stages of training. You’ll refer to this book often.

Fitness expert and personal trainer Brad Schoenfeld has written an excellent book for women who want to strengthen, streamline, and shape their bodies. Sculpting Her Body Perfect (Human Kinetics, $19.95, 0736001549) involves a three-step program that is based on the unique needs of women. Loaded with training tips, illustrations, special maintenance programs, and safe workout routines for pregnant women, the book is a perfect guide to sculpting a beautiful physique in ten to 25 minutes, three times a week. This is a good book for women who are just beginning a strength-training program.

Fitness, however, isn’t limited by age. In Slim and Fit Kids: Raising Healthy Children in a Fast-Food World (Health Communications, $12.95, 155874729X), Judy Mazel and John E. Monaco tackle the serious problem of overweight children. Surprisingly, more than 30 per cent of American children are presently overweight, and one in five is considered obese. The authors discuss combining foods to maximize a child’s energy and meet nutritional needs, along with kid-proof recipes and suggestions on how to talk to your child about this sensitive subject. Their 28-day exercise program (designed by a personal trainer) could set your child on the wellness path and perhaps create an interest in fitness that lasts a lifetime.

Pat Regel pumps iron in Nashville.

Fitness for the future This time, it's going to be different. Think about it. One year from today, you could be 70 pounds lighter and ready for a marathon or triathlon. Whether you're a beginner who's new to weight loss and aerobic and strength training,…

This Boy We Made

Taylor Harris beautifully describes how fear struck like a lightning bolt when her son began to experience baffling health issues.
NonfictionTrue Crime

Review

Review by bookpagedev

A title wave of beach paperbacks Whether you’re contemplating a trip to an exotic beach, or planning to spend the warm weather months in the back yard, you’ll want to bring along that most necessary of seasonal accouterments. No, not sunscreen. We’re talking summer reading. Especially the easy-to-tote paperback variety. A hardcover sensation, John Berendt’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: A Savannah Story, literally spent years on bestseller lists. This month the 1994 title at last debuts in soft cover. Never mind that Clint Eastwood’s movie version has come and gone. If you haven’t read this account of life and death and murder Savannah-style, replete with its parade of beguiling eccentrics, you’re in for a mint-julep-flavored treat. Southern accents and sensibilities also abound in Rebecca Wells’s Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood (HarperCollins, $14, 0060928336). Flashing back and forth from the 1990s to the 1960s, the book explores Siddalee’s efforts to understand her seemingly incomprehensible mother, the Louisiana magnolia Viviane, and her three chums. Booted out of a Shirley Temple lookalike contest when they were just six, the girls spent their college years blazing a bourbon-splattered trail, buffered by the motto (from a Billie Holiday tune), smoke, drink, don’t think. As much a paean to sisterhood as it is a mother-daughter tale, Ya-Ya is a kind of follow-up to Wells’s much darker first novel, Little Altars Everywhere, (HarperCollins, $13, 0060976845), and is being developed for a movie by Bette Midler’s production company. Yet another girly story is recounted in Bridget Jones’s Diary (Penguin, $12.95, 014028009X). Helen Fielding’s book which originated as a column in a London newspaper is the first-person odyssey of the thirtysomething Bridget, who is obsessed with such ’90s issues as learning to program her VCR, finding Mr. Right, and, of course, weight loss (in one year she manages to lose 72 pounds . . . and to gain 74). The producers of the quirky Four Weddings and a Funeral plan a movie version of the quirky Bridget.

Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel, by first-time novelist Arthur S. Golden, may also be headed for the screen with Steven Spielberg’s involvement. For now, enjoy it in print (Vintage, $14, 0679781587), as the geisha Sayuri details her metamorphosis from peasant child she was nine when her widowed father sold her to a geisha house to her prewar rise as a leading geisha and on to her role as mistress to a power-broker. Golden spent nine years researching and writing this intricately detailed saga, which takes us on a memorable, eye-opening journey.

And last but not least, we mustn’t forget Margaret Mitchell’s monumental (and perennially best-selling) classic, Gone with the Wind (Warner Books, $7.99, 0446365386).

Hollywood journalist Pat H. Broeske is also a biographer who has chronicled the lives of Howard Hughes and Elvis Presley.

A title wave of beach paperbacks Whether you're contemplating a trip to an exotic beach, or planning to spend the warm weather months in the back yard, you'll want to bring along that most necessary of seasonal accouterments. No, not sunscreen. We're talking summer reading.…

NonfictionHistory

The Fifties

Review by Roger Bishop

We remember the 1960s as a time of social protest in the United States, with diverse groups demanding change. But some of those calls for change actually had their roots in the 1950s, led by a few lonely, gifted, stubborn “accidental activists” who would not or could not tolerate the injustices they suffered and witnessed. Journalist and historian James R. Gaines introduces us to some of these courageous individuals in his enlightening, powerful and intimate The Fifties: An Underground History.

One is struck by the differences in these activists’ personal histories, whether their cause was gay rights, racial justice, feminism or environmental justice. Pauli Murray’s experiences as a multiracial Black woman, for example, led to her long legal career making advances for women’s and civil rights, including the argument that finally persuaded the Supreme Court to outlaw discrimination on the basis of sex. She was also the first African American woman to be ordained as a priest in the Episcopal Church. By contrast, Fannie Lou Hamer spent most of her life as a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta. Her civil rights activism didn’t begin until she was 45 years old, but her strong leadership skills and charismatic personality were natural assets to the movement for voting rights. Gilda Lerner had an entirely different origin story. As a young woman, she barely escaped Nazi-occupied Vienna, but she went on to teach the first college-level courses in women’s history in the United States.

Rachel Carson and Norbert Wiener had nothing in common and probably never met. But in their defining works—“she in the living world, he in the electrical, mechanical, and metaphysical one—they converged on the heretical, even subversive idea that the assertion of mastery over the natural world was based on an arrogant fantasy that carried the potential for disaster,” as Gaines writes.

The ’50s were, among other things, a time of fear for many—when raising questions could lead to losing friends or jobs at best, or to jail time, beatings and even death at worst, just for doing what one knew to be right. The activists profiled here didn’t wholly achieve their goals during the “long Fifties”—the social, cultural and political uprising between 1946 and 1963—but they made significant progress that others built on in the future.

Gaines concludes that the people he writes about were authentic rebels, although they didn’t regard themselves as such. This excellent, well-researched and well-written book shows how far America has come and yet how very far we have to go to become the country we often think we are.

James R. Gaines introduces readers to the lonely, gifted, stubborn activists whose calls for change in the 1950s influenced the course of the 20th century.
Sports

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come into their own. Today Olympic hopefuls such as Marion Jones, the most recent of the athletic divas-in-waiting, achieve superstar status before they ever compete in the Games.

In a recent biography, See How She Runs (Algonquin, $21.95, ISBN 1565122674), author Ron Rapoport explains why the basketball star turned track star has received so much attention, both for her private life and her dazzling athletic skills. In another biography of the sprinting sensation, written for children, Marion Jones (Pocket, $4.99, ISBN 074341876X), experienced sports writer Bill Gutman offers a brief, but inspiring, profile of “The Fastest Woman in the World.” These books are just two of many published in time for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

In The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics: Sydney 2000 Edition (Overlook, $23.95, ISBN 1585670464) Olympics historian David Wallechinsky provides readers with every statistic they could ever possibly want. The narrative texts that accompany the stats offer examples of the social concerns that often plagued the games in years past, especially involving race and gender. Did you know that when the first woman’s track contestants ran out onto the field in 1928, many of them hugged and kissed each other, sending the predominantly male audience into near hysterics? Or did you know that the first female winner of the 100-meter event, 16-year-old Elizabeth Robinson of Riverdale, Illinois, was “discovered” while running for a train? Another comprehensive guide is The Olympic Games (DK, $29.95, ISBN 0789459752). It covers the games from their 1896 debut in Athens to the events scheduled this year. The color photographs are several notches above the newspaper quality images we are accustomed to seeing and they add an increased element of humanity to the events. Especially useful are the charts and statistics that take up the final one-third of the book.

Also noteworthy is The Olympic Marathon (Human Kinetics, $27.95, ISBN 0880119691) in which authors David Martin and Roger Gynn offer a definitive guide to this popular event.

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have…

Sports

Review

Review by bookpagedev

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come into their own. Today Olympic hopefuls such as Marion Jones, the most recent of the athletic divas-in-waiting, achieve superstar status before they ever compete in the Games.

In a recent biography, See How She Runs (Algonquin, $21.95, ISBN 1565122674), author Ron Rapoport explains why the basketball star turned track star has received so much attention, both for her private life and her dazzling athletic skills. In another biography of the sprinting sensation, written for children, Marion Jones (Pocket, $4.99, ISBN 074341876X), experienced sports writer Bill Gutman offers a brief, but inspiring, profile of “The Fastest Woman in the World.” These books are just two of many published in time for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney.

In The Complete Book of the Summer Olympics: Sydney 2000 Edition (Overlook, $23.95, ISBN 1585670464) Olympics historian David Wallechinsky provides readers with every statistic they could ever possibly want. The narrative texts that accompany the stats offer examples of the social concerns that often plagued the games in years past, especially involving race and gender. Did you know that when the first woman’s track contestants ran out onto the field in 1928, many of them hugged and kissed each other, sending the predominantly male audience into near hysterics? Or did you know that the first female winner of the 100-meter event, 16-year-old Elizabeth Robinson of Riverdale, Illinois, was “discovered” while running for a train? Another comprehensive guide is The Olympic Games (DK, $29.95, ISBN 0789459752). It covers the games from their 1896 debut in Athens to the events scheduled this year. The color photographs are several notches above the newspaper quality images we are accustomed to seeing and they add an increased element of humanity to the events. Especially useful are the charts and statistics that take up the final one-third of the book.

Also noteworthy is The Olympic Marathon (Human Kinetics, $27.95, ISBN 0880119691) in which authors David Martin and Roger Gynn offer a definitive guide to this popular event.

Books of Olympic proportion Women were an afterthought to the modern Olympic Games that began in 1896. Almost one-third of the new century had elapsed before women were allowed to participate in track and field events.

In the years since, women have come…

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