Tag: book review

Book Review: “You Just Need to Lose Weight”: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People, Aubrey Gordon

“‘You Just Need to Lose Weight’: And 19 Other Myths About Fat People” by Aubrey Gordon is a short reference book that discusses 20 common myths and misconceptions about fatness in an attempt to equip the reader with facts, talking points and things to consider when addressing anti-fat bias (aka fatphobia).

As a long time listener and supporter of “Maintenance Phase“, Gordon’s excellent wellness and weight loss debunking podcast with Michael Hobbes (of “You’re Wrong About” fame) very little in this book was new to me. It was a distillation of many of the ideas and topics discussed in the podcast, formed into a book that is specifically meant to be a teaching aid of sorts. It is also much more of a “call to action” book than Gordon’s previous book, “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat”.

If you haven’t listened to “Maintenance Phase” I highly recommend it. You can either start with the first episode here, or jump in with one of their best episodes, on Goop. If you are looking to get into Gordon’s writing, I recommend reading “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat”. It’s much more of a reading book than a reference book. Once you’ve read that, there’s a good chance that you’ll want to keep a copy of “You Just Need to Lose Weight” around, if only to squelch tiresome Karens who tell people that “you just need to lose weight, it’s for your own good, I’m just concerned about your health”.

On a more personal note, just to highlight why I find this topic personally important (beyond me wanting to be a better, more accepting person in a better, and more accepting world):

My mother was misdiagnosed by a whole phalanx of very good doctors because all they could see is a fat person standing before them. They ignored her blood work, they ignored her biopsy, they ignored her medical history and our family’s rich and varied history with blood cancers. She nearly died because of their insistence that her problem was that she is fat. Well, she is fat, but her problem was that she had two types of blood cancer and one of them was going for her liver. The only two doctors that actually gave her a proper diagnosis were a resident that didn’t even see my mother (she just looked at the actual tests and you know, read them), and a liver doctor who is himself fat.

Bias kills. Learning about it is a moral duty, regardless of whether the bias is tied to race, gender, gender expression, size, age, disability, social class or anything else. It literally kills.

Book Review: Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie

“Murder on the Orient Express” is justifiably one of Christie’s most famous and well-regarded mysteries. I’ve read it several times before, seen more than one adaptation of it, and still it fascinates me how she got such a complex and outlandish idea to tick.

Christie created the perfect setting, both mundane and exotic, one that is designed for constant movement and yet is at a complete standstill, a small and confined location that is at the same time expansive and cosmopolitan. Here duchesses and servants mix, and Poirot moves deftly among them, not as his pompous self, but as a man in his element: efficient, kind, sharp and thoroughly enjoying himself. He is on his own, cut off from any outside information or help, with only his “little grey cells” to aid him, and he performs magnificently and with great heart and great human understanding.

If you are starting your Agatha Christie journey, this little gem full of dozens of well placed and well considered details is a good and very satisfying place to start.

Book Review: The Murder on the Links, Agatha Christie

Last year I bought a few Agatha Christie mysteries on sale for my kindle, mainly to serve as travel reading books. I love Agatha Christie, despite her outdated politics and attitudes and her slow pacing (relative to more modern authors, particularly mystery writers). She has the power to evoke a scene and a character with very few words, to weave fantastically improbable circumstances into believable narratives, and she is very readable and entertaining.

There are authors whose work I pick up whenever I really want to get my mind off things, and Christie is forefront among them.

“The Murder on the Links” is a Hercule Poirot novel, his second appearance after “The Mysterious Affair in Styles”, and the Belgian detective is here at his best. He is pompous, he is fastidiously neat, he is arrogant and manipulative, and yet he is a warm and kind person, much like his counterpart Marple.

This is not a golf book, despite the name. The Links here are almost an afterthought, and the plot largely doesn’t take place in them. A wealth man tries to hire Poirot to help him deal with a secret in his past, and yet as Poirot and Captain Hastings arrive to the man’s French coastal villa, he has been found murdered and the local police are investigating. There are several generational battles going on here, and Christie cleverly intertwines them: the young, coarse and cocky French detective Giraud of the Sûreté against the aging, polite and equally cocky Poirot; the older actors Paul and Eloise Renauld, Madame Daubreuil, Captain Hastings, against the younger ones, Jack and Marthe, the mysterious “Cinderella” and her equally mysterious sister. The plot revolves a lot around chance, as many of the genre do, but it revolves more around the pairing and contrasting of these characters, of the past to the present.

It’s a fun and light read, entertaining without being too problematic to modern readers. One of the Christie mysteries that survived the test of time pretty much unscathed.