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

Well-written and poignant, this book is quite heartwarming and helpful. There is a disclaimer at the beginning of the book that tells us that grief is different for everyone, and that if you are really having a hard time you should see a therapist.

Using personal stories and other contributions, this book talks about the stages of grief, but also how grief manifests itself or could manifest itself in you. The five stages are too cut and dry to apply to every single person, and the book show more addresses that fact. It also claims that many people misunderstand the five stages as a whole. To me, this is also understandable. Take denial for instance; if someone has died that is close to you, you may accept their being gone, but expect to hear their voice, or see them in their favorite chair or something along those lines.

Throughout, it talks about how to deal with the fact that your loved one is gone in a consoling and understanding manner. Of course people want you to be happy, but grief is a natural part of loss and it is healthy to let it all out, even if it does make others uncomfortable.

It is split into seven sections with commentary by the authors occupying the last two sections. The first covers the classic five stages one by one and how they might manifest themselves in a person. The second section covers the Inner World of Grief. This talks about how you can deal with it by telling stories, cracking their jokes, seeing angels, getting dreams about them and so on. The third section talks about the Outer World of Grief. This is focused on stuff like "How do I celebrate our Wedding Anniversary?" or "what do I do with all of these possessions?" The fourth section deals with specific situations. Say your loved one had Alzheimer's Disease. It relates stories of people that had to go through that sort of thing and reach terrible decisions and regret those decisions later. It also talks about what to say to children about dying and how to handle their grief. The Fifth section talks about the changing face of grief, and the final two sections are personal notes from the authors on the grief they had experienced in their lives.

Final thoughts: this was a wonderful book, and if you are grieving or know someone grieving, this might help to relate to them or give them some solace. show less

Kessler is a physician, lawyer, and top FDA bureaucrat who in spite of being as well informed as anyone, didn't manage not to be fat. So eventually he went looking for the science behind this, which he presents in this book. It's almost 300 pages long, and he could have written it in 30 - but again, as with Shlaes, those 30 would have been intense and demanding (and wouldn't have counted as a book). This way, it's a readable book that can be skimmed with no major intellectual show more challenge.

Kessler's thesis, in one sentence, is that sugar fat and salt make us want to eat more sugar salt and fat. Whether they understand the science or not, the food industry has cracked this truth and does its best to offer what Kessler calls hyper-palatable food, which means irresistible.

I came away from the book with the conviction that the only food one should eat is unprocessed food. As an acquaintance of mine (who hasn't read the book but gets the message) has been saying all along: I never eat anything that was created in a factory.

Near the end of the book Kessler tries to offer ways to free oneself from the tyranny of industrial sugar-salt-fat. He recommends formulating and applying counter-commands, that will block the imperatives of the enticing food we see all around us. It occurs to me that this really may work. I eat only kosher food, so all those yummy-looking extravagances I see all around me when I'm in America: I've never had them, I have no chemically inbuilt memories of how much I crave them, and were I to reach for one of them, my own repulsion would be stronger. I'll bet they taste heavenly, but I have no urge to eat them. On the contrary. 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