Born Round

In his self-narrated memoir, NEW YORK TIMES restaurant critic Bruni reveals that food is everything to him--a substitute for love, a stress reliever, and a tangible link to his late mother and grandmother. He's sincere in his self-loathing, and that comes across in his performance. That's a little sad, and shallow. He succeeds in making the listener cheer him on as he grapples with a perceived weight problem. At times, he even sounds fat. But truthfully, Bruni is not really fat, a bit chubby perhaps. Dom DeLuise, John Candy, Orson Welles were fat. Bruni, his own worst critic, spends most of the book whining about needing to drop 10 or 15 pounds. This is America. Everybody could stand to lose 10 or 15 pounds. M.S. (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine

Starred review from July 6, 2009
Outgoing New York Times
restaurant critic Bruni admits he was even a baby bulimic in his extraordinary memoir about a lifelong battle with weight problems. To his Southern Italian paternal grandmother, food equaled love. Cooking and parenting from Old World traditions, she passed these maternal and culinary principles on to her WASP daughter-in-law, whose own weight struggles her son eventually inherited. Through adolescence, puberty and into college, Bruni oscillated from gluttonous binges to adult bulimia, including laxative abuse. Vocationally, journalism called, first through the college paper, then a progression of internships and staff positions in Detroit and New York, including his stints as a Bush campaign reporter in 2000 and as the Times
Rome correspondent. In tandem, Bruni's powerlessness over his appetite developed from cafeteria meals to Chinese delivery binges to sleep eating. While Bruni includes such entertaining bits as the campaign trail seen through Weight Watcher lens and ample meals from his years as the Times
restaurant critic, in the end, his is a powerful, honest book about desire, shame, identity and self-image.

Starred review from November 15, 2009
Should best-selling author Bruni ("Ambling into History") ever tire of journalism, he could easily make a career out of audiobook narration. In this self-read memoir, he opens with his 2004 appointment as restaurant critic for the "New York Times", then tells of his lifelong struggle with food and weight (at his heaviest, he weighed 270 pounds). How he both deals with and fails to deal with his addiction to food makes this a fascinating listen. Compliments to Bruni for serving up such a candid and enthralling tale; highly recommended. [The review of the "New York Times" best-selling Penguin hc read, "Bruni's painfully honest, tartly humorous life story will]be a hit with anyone who has struggled with the numbers on the scale," "LJ" 8/09.Ed.]Cliff Glaviano, Bowling Green State Univ. Libs., OH

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.