Born Round: A Story of Family, Food and a Ferocious Appetite
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- ISBN13: 9780143117674
- Condition: New
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Product Description
The New York Times restaurant critic’s heartbreaking and hilarious account of how he learned to like food just enough
Frank Bruni was born round. Round as in stout, rotund, and permanently hungry. His relationship with eating was hard and his struggle with it started early. When named the restaurant critic for The New York Times in 2004, he knew he would be performing one of the most watched tasks in the epicurean universe. And with food his friend and enemy both, his jitters all ears primarily on whether he’d finally made some sense of that relationship. A captivating tale of his unpredictable journalistic odyssey as well as his lifelong like-despise affair with food, Born Round will speak to everyone who’s ever had to rein in an appetite to avoid letting out a waistband.Amazon.com Review
Amazon Best of the Month, August 2009: How a man with a lifelong battle of the bulge landed the job as the restaurant critic for the New York Times, the most influential job in the food world, is only half the tale (more like a third, really) in Frank Bruni’s courageous, cruelly honest, regularly hilarious, and truly endearing memoir, Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater.
Bruni struggled with over-eating since he was a boy growing up in a food-all ears family tree in White Plains, NY. From adolescence through adulthood, Bruni was on the losing side of maintaining a healthy relationship with food, and eventually his inability to control his hunger–manifested in bulimia, convenience store binges, and bouts of sleep eating–defined his life. There aren’t many books out there dealing with what it’s like to be a man with an eating disorder. While Bruni’s tale is peppered with humor, his disgust at himself as he yo-yo’s up to size 42 denims at the Gap and endures years-long patches of celibacy leaves the reader aching in empathy.
Self-doubt about his appearance causes him to sabotage any chances at happiness as he makes lame excuses to postpone dates in the hopes that he’ll drop persons few extra pounds before he might have to reveal himself. And throughout the book he’s banking on being slimmer in the future–whether it’s a few days, weeks, or months–and sacrifices truly appreciating the present, even when he’s holding prestigious jobs at Newsweek and the New York Times.
“I was in refuge, my weight a reason not to reach out or take risks. I’d deal with my like life once I got thinner…. Heaviness simplified life and lessened the stakes. It place life on intermission, building the present a larded dividing line between a past normalcy and a future one. It argued against bold initiatives…. But while I wasn’t trying to make things take place, they nonetheless happened to me.”
There’s a very amusing account of how he worked with a photographer friend to digitally manipulate his leader photo for Ambling into History in an attempt “to transform the round into the oblong, rotund into chiseled, gone-to-seed to come-to-Papa.” When he saw the results of the final photo (the one that would be taped behind the reservation stand of many New York restaurants) his friend wondered: “When was the last time anyone at the publishing house saw you?”
And when he gets the tap to become restaurant critic and leaves his gig as the Times’s Rome bureau chief, he starts a preparatory world-tour of eating research before entering an exhausting career of eating out seven nights a week, juggling multiple dining identities (with matching AmEx cards), and apt one of “the most loved and despised tastemakers in New York.” –Brad Thomas Parsons
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way too much detail about food and too small depth. skimmed much of the book. not recommended.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
The book is exactly what I ordered, but smells like smoke. Had to air it out for a few days.
Reader’s Rating: 2 / 5
Huge deal, a stout boy grows up in an middle class family tree obsessed with food and flab. He never ventures to learn about the nutritional content of food, where it’s grown, how animals are raised. It’ all about filling and emptying his gut. Frank is a predictable shallow homosexual. I grew to dislike him the more I read this book thinking how audacious he is. Why should I care about what he thinks about food? There was small of any humor or appealing characters in the book. Don’t waste your time.
Reader’s Rating: 1 / 5
But what is the dream?
Unable to like, Frank pursues hedonistic pleasures. Relationships hinge on what others bring to the table. Everything Bruni does is for his own pleasure, his own ego, and never, not once, does he give to a name if there is nothing in it for himself.
He captures his family tree’s aura well and maintains a semblance of self-discipline but for all his prided relations, he is missing the ability to connect in like.
Reader’s Rating: 3 / 5
About: Biography of New York Times food critic Frank Bruni focusing on his struggles with food and weight.
Pros: Wonderfully written with some of the best descriptions of food I’ve ever read. Pictures spread out throughout the book, not clumped in the middle.
Cons: None noted
Grade: A
Reader’s Rating: 5 / 5