David A. Kessler

This is a really beautiful book about the power of loss and grief and life. Kessler collaborated with Elizabeth Kubler-Ross (she defined the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) and has worked as professional grief counselor in a variety of roles. His own life has been marked by grief: beyond the ordinary losses, his mother died of kidney disease when he was a child and his son died of an overdose.

He writes with great sensitivity and experience, and show more beneficially engages with Victor Frankl, who's fantastic book Man's Search for Meaning left a lot unsaid about actually searching for meaning.

The core of Kessler's argument is that loss is inevitable and grief is necessary, natural, and always different. But in general, at some point the pain will transform. Love transcends death. Letting others witness your grief can help that transformation. Letting loss become a source of service to others can help. And feeling the positive presence of those who are gone can help.

The chapters are framed around many of the most common scenarios of loss: parents, partners, children, by sudden accident or slow disease, by fire and water and in sunshine and nighttime. show less

Great quick read and very informative in terms of the true health/nutrition realities for the guilty pleasures our North American eating culture turns a blind eye to. The mantra, not surprisingly, emphasizes and identifies sugar, fats and salt as the culprits and key ingredients utilized by a fast food industry intent on hooking their consumers on easy, tasty food. These overused ingredients lead to overeating, obesity and blind addiction. Kessler moves the reader beyond the general show more awareness that these three key ingredients lead to obesity by delving into the menu's of familiar eateries, describing the typical experience of visiting, ordering and eating the foods while investigating how the foods are prepared. He reveals surprising practices and, by illuminating how foods are injected and prepared, creating a deeper conscious awareness of our choices of food the next time we step up to the counter to choose these foods. A good resource for young people beginning to explore health issues and choices albeit a little repetitive. show less

I read On Grief and Grieving for a couple of reasons. One, my husband and I have experienced a handful of significant losses in the past two years and we’re both still dealing with the effects of that. Our grief counselor suggested this book. Two, I’m writing a novel in which the main characters deal with a huge loss (art imitating life?) and I wanted more insight into how grief works and how different people grieve. It’s a great book, full of information that will shed light on an show more often-confusing darkness and help you feel less alone. Grief is a strange animal and this book is all about embracing that fact and being patient with the process. I plan to keep this book on the shelf for future hard times. I know it will come in handy. show less

Why do so many of us have a tendency, or even a compulsion, to eat more than is good for us, and to eat things we know perfectly well aren't healthy? David Kessler answers this question in two parts. First, he discusses what happens in our brains when food gets associated with wonderful floods of reward chemicals washing over our neurons, and why that can have so much power over us. Then he talks about the food industry, and the ways in which it deliberately engineers food for show more "craveability." Which, yes, is an actual term they actually use.

Kessler lays out the facts and the scientific arguments and their implications in a clear and readable way, although he sometimes repeats things more than he really has to. And I could have done without the many detailed descriptions of how various restaurants cook up their various yummy dishes with remarkably similar salt-and-fat-infusing techniques, if only because they made me really, really hungry. Which undoubtedly helps to prove his point, but is nevertheless somewhat unkind. I also think he leaves out or downplays some of the more complex social factors that help determine how we relate to food. But his points all seem pretty good, as far as they go.

Then, in the last few sections, he addresses the question of what can be done about overeating, offering up some suggestions for those seeking to lose weight, including some that have worked for him. They're all very sane and sensible suggestions, offered up in a tone that is encouraging without downplaying the difficulty. And yet, I cannot help but come away with the depressing feeling that for those of us conditioned towards unhealthy eating, real change and lasting weight loss require such Herculean effort and the sacrifice of so many sources of joy and satisfaction that even the first step of convincing ourselves it's truly worth it may be insurmountably hard.

Also, I want some pizza now. And a chocolate chip cookie. Sigh. show less