BookPage Reviews
The best medicine
2015 BookPage Summer Reads
Laughter can tighten your abs, soothe your mind and increase your empathy. Lighten up your summer reading with two funny new books that have both heart and brains.
When Patricia Marx, a New Yorker staffer, former "SNL" writer and Harvard Lampoon alum, commits to four months of brain fitness, watch out. "I could use some buckling down," she writes. "My mental skyscape has too many aircraft aloft." Let's Be Less Stupid: An Attempt to Maintain My Mental Faculties details her often hilarious forays into IQ testing, online brain games, electrical brain stimulation and mindfulness meditation to combat the regrettable effects of aging. The book is peppered with wacky diagrams drawn by Marx; most are intentionally primitive, but her Millard Fillmore, on a list of "Presidents to Forget," is surprisingly on the money. There are also a variety of puzzles and quizzes; only some are real, but all are funny.
Marx's efforts don't always go as planned—she elects to learn Cherokee for the benefits of being bilingual, but confuses it with Navajo, the language she intended to learn. She still makes impressive gains for the time invested, and offers tips for those who want to give it a try. Crossword mavens may want to pick up a sudoku, or a Cherokee phrasebook, as it's the process of learning something new that builds brain strength.
Since one of the meditation techniques mentioned here is laughter, merely reading this book could help your hippocampus feel the burn. Start with Marx's suggestions, then plot your personal brain boot camp since sadly, liposuction is not an option for shaping up an aging brain.
Like diners at a popular Italian restaurant chain, readers of popular suspense writer Lisa Scottoline and her daughter Francesca Serritella enjoy the sense that "when you're here, you're family." Does This Beach Make Me Look Fat?, the duo's latest collection, is true to form, featuring riffs and one-liners about relationships, fitness, work and family traditions. (Christmas ornaments that have seen better days or that memorialize beloved pets? "If you're maimed or dead, you're on our tree.")
This book—the sixth from the mother-daughter team—brings the sad news that Mary, the family matriarch who figures in many of Scottoline's funniest true and fictional stories, has died. The loss leaves Serritella more reflective about life and love just as she re-enters the dating pool, but she recalls venting about her love life to her grandmother one day and receiving this reply, written on a dry erase board: "Motto: Who needs it?" (When Mary realized that people were taking photos of her dry-erase messages to preserve them for posterity, she began writing things like, "Eat sh*t.") Scottoline notes that the richness of her mother's love unexpectedly made the grieving process more bearable.
Take this collection to the beach (Spoiler: It doesn't make you look fat after all!) and consider it a drama-free family reunion.
This article was originally published in the July 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.
Copyright 2012 BookPage Reviews.Kirkus Reviews
New Yorker staff writer Marx (Starting from Happy: A Novel, 2011, etc.), the first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon, brings her wit and quirky curiosity to the timely topic of mental acuity. Frothy, funny, and abounding in quizzes, exercises, and questionnaires, the author's latest romp takes readers to the field of applied brain studies, of great interest to an aging population. "With more baby boomers reported to be afraid of losing their minds than of dying," she writes, "the worried well—and also a few who aren't doing so hot—spend more than a billion dollars a year on brain fitness." She, too, would like to transform her brain "into a spiffy young noggin," and during her four-month quest for "cognitive rejuvenation," she engaged in "brain-boosting pursuits" that may or may not have had any positive impact. Along the way, she discovered befuddling controversies. Alcohol, for example, "does not kill brain cells" but does damage dendrites, which conduct mess ages from one cell to another. According to some experts, rearranging furniture stimulates the brain, as does taking a nap, ingesting ginkgo biloba, not ingesting ginkgo biloba, consuming antioxidants, and creating "top one hundred" lists. "As someone whose favorite sport is sitting," Marx confesses, "I would just once like to hear some bad news about physical exercise." Alas, "better thinking" turns out to be a benefit of aerobics. Willing to try some form of meditation, Marx chose "mindfulness," clicking on a YouTube video featuring clouds, waves, sunsets, "and any number of other pictures that look like the photographs you've removed from store-bought frames." Since bilingual students tend to do better on certain intelligence tests, Marx set out to learn Cherokee from Memrise, "a free website that teaches memorization through crowdsourced mnemonics." A sly, irreverent take on the latest obsessions regarding self-improvement. Copyright Kirkus 2015 Kirkus/BPI Communications.All rights reserved.
Publishers Weekly Reviews
New Yorker staff writer Marx (Starting from Happy) chronicles her four-month-long quest to improve her memory and re-up her IQ to where it was in the glory days of her 20s. Employing candor and wit, she tackles the science and sociology of the brain fitness rage and delivers suggestions and solutions for stemming widespread neurological downslide. Marx test-drives brain exercises, electric zapping, and learning a new language (Cherokee in her case), and throws in some blueberries and fish oil pills for good measure. She also debunks faulty findings. For example, alcohol doesn't kill brain cells, she writes. In fact, according to a study from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, 29% of people who never drank suffered mental impairment, while only 19% of the imbibers did. She blames the information age for overstuffing people's brains with information. Marx includes quizzes, tests, and teasers to improve readers' memories, aiming them at her fellow baby boomers who fear dementia more than death. She also provides lists of things to forget, including inconsequential presidents, wars, and Shakespeare plays. Reflecting on her overall experience, she writes, "I spent so much trying to improve my brain that I had no time to use it," but her work belies that statement. Marx has written a hilarious and comforting book on maintaining mental acumen at any age. (July)
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