frazzled & frumpy

I'm not well acquainted with grief.  Not the kind that tears your soul and makes you wonder how life continues to go on.  I've been lucky, I guess.  As I started The Rules of Inheritance , by Claire Bidwell Smith, I worried that it would depress me or that I wouldn't connect with the author.  I don't have much in common with Claire.  Her life experience is so different than mine, that I had to remind myself that this was a memoir, not a novel. In the book, Claire shares the powerful and heart-wrenching story of the loss of her parents.  I wasn't sure how I felt about the way she skipped from one time of her life to another, but I soon got lost in the story and read the book in two days. Claire paints a vivid picture and her storytelling is profound.  One of the most haunting parts for me was when she described grief being her constant companion- "Grief holds my hand as I walk down the sidewalk, and grief doesn't mind when I cry because it's ...

(This is a paid review for BlogHer Book Club, but the opinions expressed are my own.) When you’re brought up thinking one way, it can be very difficult to change that way of thinking.  This was my dilemma as I began reading ‘Why Women Need Fat’.  The authors presented a new, (and a bit radical), idea about the way we eat. Basically, it's that the oils we’ve been using, that are touted as ‘good for us’, are making us fat. This was a hard pill to swallow. We all hear daily about trans fats and cholesterol and how we must use vegetable oil or soybean oil to keep those dangers at bay.  The book presents lots of scientific evidence to show that this isn't true. (And, I'll admit, I had a hard time getting through some of the chapters that were so filled with this evidence.) The authors, Dr. Lassek (a physician) and Dr. Gaulin (an anthropologist),  have found that women today are much heavier than their counterparts of the 1960’s.  Look at a photo of your ...