Customer Reviews

Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-time Eater

5 star:		(57)
4 star:		(21)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(10)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

I've always enjoyed reading Frank Bruni's down-to-earth restaurant reviews in the New York Times and his memoir, Born Round is written in the same easy-going and engaging style. Bruni writes about his food-centered Italian-American upbringing and his lifelong struggle to keep his weight under control. As a female reader, it was interesting to read about weight control from a male perspective. But what I really enjoyed most about the book were the portraits of his mother and Italian grandmother. He obviously loved them dearly and his portrayal of them is, to me, the heart of the book. Bruni is an open-hearted and accessible writer. Highly recommended!

For many of us this will at last be a book to identify with. It seems most fight with addictions to something which can range from the most thought of - alcohol and drugs to physical exercise and what so many are fighting today - the addiction to food. This book is an excursion through Frank Bruni's ages of food - his love and pure joy of it engulfs and overwhelms his child hood and about the first 100 pages of his story, then falls into his growing battle with weight gain.
His descriptions of food loved and memories of childhood foods and his Italian family can make you laugh in pure pleasure and remembrance. His ability to draw you into his feelings and life are readily apparent from the first page to the last; including his marvelous description as the middle child caught between the charismatic and confident older brother and the younger space cadet. Ah yes, but Frank can out eat any one and so begins his war with his body and proceeds with his narratives of what he's thinking and the food obsessions as he goes through his high school, college and professional years.
So many of us can identify with dates postponed, old friends put off because weight has been gained and the diets that will start Monday with a binge before the diet and failure by Wednesday.
This book is an interesting read, but could just as well be used as psychological study, one that can explain the lure of food to those who just don't understand. It can also be a cathartic read for those of us that struggle - you aren't the only one out there - recognize the cop outs we use: it must be the weight ...I'm not getting dates, not getting invited to parties, not getting promoted. This can allow you to see yourself or someone you care about.
Bruni is astute enough that he sees how excess weight can result in your brain fooling itself that one does not look as large as one does and how it put his life on hiatus. He will not do this or that until the weight is gone, which will be sometime in the near distant future.
Frank Bruni becomes a New York food critic, an amazingly tough job for anyone. At the risk of giving away the end of the book smaller portions and exercise win out; but then it ends with the realization, that as with all addictions you can fall again. Those of us that wish to understand either our, or other's food problems would be well advised to read this book. Of course those who would just like an interesting book to read would be well advised to read it too.

There are those people who can eat a buffet-table full of food and not gain an ounce. You know them... heck, you may be one of them. For some of us, this is sadly not always the case. Frank Bruni's brutally honest memoir stands out as an accounting of a life where this may be true. Food isn't just food, it becomes a habit. A lifestyle. A ghost in your life that everything else revolves around. This is the story of his struggles and exaltations regarding it.

Bruni is a great writer. This book is engulfing. It's a, forgive the phrase, entertaining melancholy, of sorts. It's no small task to write an autobiography that is always interesting, and for the most part, this book is. Most often, I skip the "childhood chapters" in such books, but here I found myself engrossed, and reading them. Perhaps it was because I've had to fight this struggle, myself.

The transformation from being a slave to food, to liberated under it... truly, Mr. Bruni has conquered so much. We all must find peace with our ways of life, and this is not a tale about a struggle with food (well it is, of course) but so much the story of a man who has conquered his inner demons to fulfill his potential. It's inspiring and encouraging to read.

The problem with writing about your weight problems is that they loom so very large in your own mind, but really aren't quite as interesting to those around you. Frank Bruni is at his best when he is discussing the overwhelming love of his family and how it centers around massive amounts of elaborate food. While the reader may identify with Bruni's obsession with his yo-yoing weight, after awhile it gets old to read about. Never does he stop to question whether or not he really is only as valuable as he is thin. "Born Round" is fascinating as a chronicle of food in an Italian-American family, and as a memoir of Bruni's career in journalism, it is far less fascinating as a tale of triumph over eating issues.

The book has some wonderful parts to it. I loved reading and learning about his family and the foods his mother, grandmother and aunts created and served. The abundance of food served at family gatherings along with the sweet game of 'I'm going to serve much more food than any one else in the family!' that the ladies in the family partake in are things that mirror the happenings in my own family. Some parts made me laugh out loud with familiarity while others made me grimace and groan with understanding. These parts were my favorite parts of the book.

The rest of the book, the yo-yo dieting, the struggle with weight that Frank Bruni went through got less and less interesting to me. Page after page and chapter after chapter... I struggled along with Frank just trying to get through the book.

It's worth reading if you are interested in what someone might go through to keep their weight at a level which they are happy with. And some of the ways he tried to do that were indeed fascinating to read. But, for me, the parts of the book that really shine include his family and food.

Many reader reviews give Mr. Bruni five stars for his recent book, and I was right with them (well, perhaps in the four star category) until the dessert course came along. Did these other reviewers savor that part as much as what came before? Did it provide the perfect finish to a well-paced and enjoyable meal up to that point? It certainly didn't for me.

In fact, I personally found the last part of the book so bad that it ruined my entire memory of what came before. Much of the book appears to be a brutally honest and unflinching account of his highly dysfunctional relationship to food -- and he keeps returning to this theme again and again, often awkwardly. His early childhood is easily the best writing in the book, partly because it's about so much more than just food and stuffing his face silly. His writing about his family is both touching and lyrical.

But his immaturity about food and relationships that's almost charming as a boy becomes increasingly off-putting as the book continues . . . because that immaturity (in addition to a "look at me!" quality that's so common in this reality show world we live in) never abates. He details his food disorders that are truly titantic: sleep eating (eating whole meals in middle of night and not remember it the next day)? Eating take-out from three different places in one night . . . and then following that with a pint of Haagen-Dazs? A bonified bulimic? Even if you occasionally feel guilty about misadventures in your eating, you'll be horrified at what Bruni puts on display. Cringes become automatic after a while.

Of course, his train wreck of a life (and appetite) comes to a screeching halt towards the end of the book, nearly when he's made Restaurant Critic at the New York Times. Suddenly he's Mr. Exercise and Self-Control, and he's almost as successful as his Super Rich Brothers. And he's so Clever about how he escapes detection at the New York restaurants! All this is simultaneously nauseating and boring as hell. The book goes from can't-put-down to skim-as-fast-as-you-can-to-last-page. It suddenly begins to read like a bad self-help book, and Bruni suddenly becomes both dishonest and self-important. The sections about training and his restaurant visits (which should be fascinating) are as dull and artificial as the first part of his book was unexpected and real.

Only at the end, when he bizarrely mentions a couple of more binges on the last pages (in the uncorrected proof that I have), do we see the old disordered Bruni again . . . and some honesty returns.

Apparently, I was not the only one who felt this way. The first (and only) review I read after finishing the book was from a blog on [...]. It's concluding paragraph had this to say:

"In many ways, it's a powerful story, highly relatable and familiar to many of us. But the book belabors in 368 pages what we know in the first few chapters - this man has a fraught relationship with food and self-image. The meticulous detailing of that relationship seems self-indulgent at best, at worst an unhealthy excuse to feed his neuroses."

Btw, the Times is currently looking for another critic . . . after all, who would trust another one of his reviews after reading this book that should have titled Born Round: The Self-Important Secret History of a Disordered Eater?

At first glance, I was interested in reading Frank Bruni's book simply to gain an insight into the life of a food critic whose work I have enjoyed and appreciated as a lover of food and a patron of many of the restaurants that he has reviewed in Manhattan. However, within the first few chapters I found so much more to his story. Bruni's narrative discusses his life long relationship (both healthy and unhealthy)with food and how it has shaped him both figuratively and literally. Anyone who has ever felt "fat" will find Bruni's strugggle and finally, his "truce" with food inspirational in its simplicity. Apart from geography, although I have very little in common with Mr Bruni's narrative, I felt a strong connection to his life's story. His simple, yet deceptively insightful and detailed style of story telling makes for a very entertaining, pleasant and perhaps overly quick read.

That Frank Bruni is a gifted writer should be self-evident by virtue of his long tenure as a reporter for the NEW YORK TIMES.

His renowned restaurant reviews of the past five years have been models of food aware insight of the highest standards, and of telling turns of phrase. Thus it is no surprise that BORN ROUND, his memoir, is beautifully written and fascinating.

What this memoir is not about, however -- not much, anyway -- is the fine art of restaurant reviewing. Fairly enough, BORN ROUND is all about him.

His discourse about his life-long obsession with food, far more often as a glutton than as a connoisseur, is moving, while disturbing at the same time. The consequence of both his excessive weight for much of his life (but not now), and his feelings of self-loathing as a result of that excess, would effectively cause him to withdraw socially from life.

He writes about this ongoing problem with great self-awareness and honesty, to a degree that is admirable. Having had my own weight battles and bouts of yo-yo dieting, it was with that shock of recognition that I was startled to see him identify syndromes that I never had acknowledged personally.

The descriptions of his childhood, his family, their lively and delicious meals, all make for a compelling report. Despite his fierce reputation, his love for his family -- most of all, for his mother and paternal grandmother -- makes him sound simply nice. The Brunis disprove Tolstoy's theory that happy families are all alike.

The brief section he includes on the vagaries of restaurant reviewing is entertaining, especially for those of us who have an interest in the topic.

Overall, BORN ROUND is an extremely worthwhile book, all the more so for anyone in a constant battle against weight gain. Inescapably, though, it also is a sad history.

By his own account, Mr. Bruni seems to have gotten his demons under control. I wish him good luck.

"Born Round" should be required reading if you think about food, are trying to lose weight, or particularly if you're mad at yourself for not losing weight. Author Frank Bruni's brutal honesty and courage 'to tell all' has the capacity to not only change lives, but maybe save a few too.

If it's too easy to think about food for most of us, it's nothing compared to the opportunities for this food obsessed journalist and Pulitzer prize finalist. Ironically, as his career grows so do temptations and opportunities for sabotage. As press to the president he's offered eight meals a day. As restaurant critic for the NY Times he's required to eat a minimum of seven restaurant dinners a week. Perilous perks indeed!

Some of his anecdotes are hilarious (but tragic) white lies to justify or rectify a food binge, to acknowledge or ignore expanding clothes size and some scarier food disorder behaviors which thankfully he has the courage to stop.

His battles are no small feat and convincingly he makes instructive moments sound fresh. Based In Italy he embraces quality over quantity and accepts the simplest strategy, that food input has to balance with exercise output.

His humility makes him accessible. Although a journalist of much repute, he doesn't boast about his accomplishments but frames them in terms of his weaknesses - "how much weight will I gain with this assignment?"

Its charm, apart from the great stories and touching family memories, is his honesty. Anyone who loves food but needs to deny themselves at times will see themselves in his writing.

"Born Round" is a truly entertaining and inspiring read. Bravo to a very courageous author!

Frank Bruni's new memoir Born Round chronicles the longtime New York Times columnist's lifelong struggle with food. Born into a large Italian family where cooking is a contact sport, Bruni begins to struggle with his weight as a child, and continues to struggle with it into adulthood and beyond. He tries all manner of fad diets and even eating disorders and drugs before discovering his holy grail for consumption in his mid-30s--eat food in small portions and exercise constantly. He finally has his weight and his life under control when he embarks on a great food journey--becoming the food reviewer for the Times.

I loved this memoir, and I'm not usually a huge memoir fan. Bruni gives overeating and excess weight a very human face that anyone who has ever struggled to balance a love of food and weight can appreciate. The same wit that made his columns must reads in the weekly Times food section (and I don't even live in NYC!) make this a wonderful read. The book is at times laugh out loud funny, and at other times deeply emotional. It helps that Bruni has led a very interesting life and his tidbits about life as a reporter--particularly while on the campaign trail with President George W. Bush in 1999 and 2000--just lend more color to this already very colorful book.

If you're looking for an enjoyable and fast read, I would recommend this book. However I will warn that the book contains material about eating disorders, so if you are sensitive about this subject, or fad dieting, you might want to avoid. Bruni does not advocate these things, but he is honest about his experiences.