Outside A Dog

Another book I’ve been asked to review is What Does Your Doctor Look Like Naked?: Your Guide to Optimum Health By Dr. J. Warren Willey II. Dr. Willey is an osteopathic physician and competitive bodybuilder who promotes education and understanding of your body’s own needs in order to maintain optimal health.

Dr. Willey believes in the idea that the food we eat every day can be used as a type of drug to impact the way the body behaves. As Dr. Willey explains it:

“Our goal together and your goal long term should always be to increase lean mass. … I found that when we focus on lean mass and overall health, fat loss is a side effect. It always happens, because our bodies have a place where they like to be, but we are survivalists by nature. Thinking in terms of our ancestors… who used to roam the plains out there hunting and gathering, would eat a large meal and then they wouldn’t get to eat for a long time. Their bodies knew that, so they stored fat. So the first thing that your body does when you are on a calorie deficit is save the fat and burn the muscle. …We have to pull what I call metabolic trickery. We have to teach the body that muscle should be left alone.”

Dr. Willey also advocates what he calls ‘true health care’: in making the right food and exercise choices, a healthy, long-term lifestyle can be developed and maintained so that common diseases usually associated with poor self-care and old age can be avoided. He believes that most modern health care focuses mainly on treating diseases and their symptoms instead of promoting better overall health that will instead prevent ailments such as diabetes. In What Does Your Doctor Look Like Naked?, Dr. Willey discusses age-management medicine (heavily reliant on nutrition and exercise), hormone replacement therapies, body composition, and the impact of food choice on the human body.

I was a chemistry major in my former life as a college student, and I can appreciate that Dr. Willey presents his information very well. Nutrition and information about body processes can be complex and overwhelming subjects, but here it is explained simply. And I do agree with the idea that a lot of what ails our population today could be reduced simply by re-evaluating our lifestyle choices and more importantly, our eating habits. If nothing else, the first third of this book is worth looking through simply for the information it presents about different kinds of food and the effects they have on the body’s systems. (The latter two-thirds of the book are devoted to appendices: eating plans, exercise routines, supplement recommendations, and food lists.) This book may prove to be a good resource to discuss with your own physician if you are interested in changing your nutritional habits in order to prevent disease.

The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears in Paris at the World’s Most Famous Cooking School by Kathleen Flinn is another one of those books that I knew I had to read when I stumbled across it in a bookstore. [I promise, I don't do this with everything I see...] But really, Paris and cooking in one book?

Kathleen Flinn returned to her job in London after a vacation only to find she’d lost her job. In a bit of a tizzy to figure out what to do next, she turned to her boyfriend, Mark, who encouraged her to follow her dream of moving to Paris to study at Le Cordon Bleu. Despite her only rudimentary French, she and Mark packed up and headed to Paris. To earn her desired degree from Le Cordon Bleu, Kathleen needed to complete three courses: Basic, Intermediate, and Superior Cuisine, all while surviving an unfamiliar city, competitive classmates, cranky chefs, and her own life.

This book is a little heavier on the more romantic and day-to-day aspects of Kathleen’s life than I would have expected from a book hanging out the shelf below Bill Buford’s Heat, but that’s not to say that I didn’t enjoy it — I am female, after all, and what’s not to like about falling in love in [and with] Paris? As a bit of a bonus, each chapter ends with a recipe — though, sadly but understandably, not the ones Kathleen learned while at Le Cordon Bleu.

Overall, though, one things stands out: this book did a great job of fueling the fire of my desire to move to Paris and learn to cook à la Julia Child. Not like I really needed any more help, though.

Quickly, before I disappear again: next book!

I was asked to review a copy of Finding Happiness: Monastic Steps for a Fulfilling Life by Abbot Christopher Jamison, and though I would label myself as more spiritual than religious, I really did enjoy reading this book and contemplating my own reaction to it.

Abbot Christopher begins his book by addressing the history of the idea of happiness, citing Plato and Aristotle and comparing their ideals to those to the monastic vision of happiness. From there, Abbot Christopher moves forward in time to examine the ways of Saint Antony of Egypt and the first Christian monks and nuns. In the second part of the book, each chapter explores one of a set of traits called the Eight Thoughts — gluttony, lust, greed, anger, sadness, acedia ( “a state of restlessness and inability either to work or to pray”), vanity and pride — and how to best recognize and overcome them in our lives.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m not exactly a religious person, but I would hesitate to classify this as strictly a religious book. While Abbot Christopher does explore the religious basis for everything he presents, he does so in a manner that I found to be not at all ‘preachy’. One of my favorite passages in the book is about hope:

“Hope is the surest remedy against sadness and so we have to take conscious steps to sustain hope. While we recognize the need to foster a loving attitude in children, today people tend not to foster hope with the same self-conscious energy. Cassian invites us to exercise a discipline of hope. This means not placing our hope where it is subject to change and decay, avoiding reliance for our interior well-being on wealth and position. We are heading back to the primitive definition of happiness if we have placed our hope in financial markets or promotion. The disappointments and the successes of our daily lives should both be treated with balance and not be the source alternately of sadness and elation. Hope is bigger than these, on par with love, so that just as I do not determine my love for somebody just by my mood today so my hope should not be subject to passing events.” (pg. 131-132)

This is another book that made me sit and think quietly when I had turned the final page, and I’ve since become a little more aware of my own shortcomings and stumbling points on my quest to be truly happy.

One of my favorite books that I’ve read so far this month is Paris To the Moon by Adam Gopnik. As a bit of a Francophile, my want went off in my head as soon as I saw it in the store quite some time ago.

Paris To the Moon isn’t exactly a quick, easy read, as the stories it collects were originally printed as essays in The New Yorker and are wonderfully dense. Adam Gopnik moved with his wife to Paris shortly after their son was born, and stayed for the next five years, through the turn of the century and the birth of their daughter. Each chapter addresses its own topic, from finding an apartment to French politics, to high couture, to raising a son in a culture and surroundings in which his own parents are not entirely comfortable themselves.

This book captivated me, and is partially responsible for rekindling my own urge to spend some serious time not only in the City of Lights, but in the rest of France. Gopnik is witty and eloquent and captures perfectly the charm that I imagine Paris to have, all while patiently exploring and navigating the many differences between his native culture and that of his adopted city.

And… I’m back! Work is slowly taking over my life, so not much time for reviewing, but I’m still managing to set aside plenty for reading. Hopefully I’ll be able to go on a massive posting spree and get all caught up soon.

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf is one of those novels that I’ve been meaning to read for ages but would usually get passed over in favor of something less intimidating. I dipped in and out of it for the better part of a month and a half, and finally steeled myself to finish off the last sixty pages one evening towards the end of last week. And then when I was done, I thought, ‘that’s it?’

The entirety of Mrs. Dalloway takes place during the course of one day, with the story taking place as the reader follows the various characters around London. The story flows from one character to another as they interact — and I use the word ‘interact’ loosely here, maybe ‘encounter’ is better for some of them — with each other, culminating with Clarissa Dalloway’s party at the end of the evening, where everything all kind of ties together.

I wasn’t an English major, so I can’t begin to understand the complexities and subtleties that are most likely hiding in this work. I’ve never read Ulysses by James Joyce, either, a novel to which Mrs. Dalloway is (apparently) often paralleled, so there goes more that I might be missing. While I did enjoy reading about each of the characters and getting little glimpses of what makes them tick as they communicate with each other, this is, at times, a very tedious book.

At some point in the future, I’ll probably give it another try in hopes of getting more from it, and I also intend to give To the Lighthouse a go. But I can’t say that Mrs. Dalloway will ever make my list of favorites.