The Sound of One Thigh Clapping: Haiku for a Thinner You [Hardcover]

Meredith Clair (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 15, 2003

The rigors of Ornish, reduced to seventeen syllables. Weight Watchers in three lines of enigmatic verse. The paradoxof Atkins-shed pounds while wolfing down cheese, eggs, and meat-distilled to a Zen-like utterance. Or call it the path to losing oneself, in the language of finding oneself. Inspired by a weight loss guru's pithy sayings-Craving is the root of all suffering, Self-esteem = Sodium-Meredith Clair, an inveterate dieter, explores the connection between diet and haiku, eacha discipline that insists on cutting out excess, stripping down to the bare essentials, and counting, be it calories or syllables. The result is The Sound of One Thigh Clapping, a collection of tiny, hilarious moments in the epic journey to reach the Land of the Thin.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Meredith Clair is a lawyer and haiku poet.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 128 pages
• Publisher: Workman Publishing Company (November 15, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0761131426
• ISBN-13: 978-0761131427
• Product Dimensions: 6.5 x 4.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,428,409 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #89 in Books > Health, Fitness & Dieting > Exercise & Fitness > Hip & Thigh Workouts

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You'll laugh your love handles right off!!!, November 5, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sound of One Thigh Clapping: Haiku for a Thinner You (Hardcover)

This is the most clever send-up of our obsession with weight and beauty to come along in a long, long time -- and she misses not a single diet, food item, or weight loss method! It's laugh-out-loud hilarious! Weight Watchers, Scarsdale Diet, Grapefruits, Diet Pills, Gastric Bypass -- they're all in there. What makes it even more brilliant? The haikus were actually written in the tradition of Basho. These are real haikus, not knock-knock jokes broken down into a 5-7-5 meter. And the cleverness of measurement of verse is especially cool considering the theme of the book -- counting points, counting calories, counting pounds. All in all, a perfectly executed piece of writing, and a perfect gift for anyone and everyone.

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars The humorous side of dieting, January 2, 2004

By 

Eileen Rieback (Coral Springs, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Sound of One Thigh Clapping: Haiku for a Thinner You (Hardcover)

Author Meredith Clair tried every fad diet and failed. Then she joined the Weight Watchers class run by Ertha, who ran the class like a Zen master and provided "thinspirations" that seemed to work. According to Ertha, dieting is about suffering and sacrifice, and the four enemies of diet success are temptation, sloth, jealousy, and weakness. So Clair decided to distill this diet wisdom, along with a lifetime of dieting experience, into haiku verse.

I would categorize this book as a humor book rather than a diet book since there is not a lot of advice on dieting how-to. The haiku itself does not flow very well compared to "Honku: the Zen Antidote to Road Rage" or other similar titles. That is why I did not give the book more stars than I did. However, it does touch upon every fad diet and frustration the typical dieter encounters, and it is quite funny. Here are some examples:

On temptation: Chocolate passes/too quickly over the tongue/preferring the hips.
On sloth: Training wheels, training/bras, and personal trainers./The Cycle of Life.
On weakness: Tasty pink grapefruit - /significantly less so/after the eighth day.
On jealousy: Consider Helen/whose face launched all that trouble./Better to be plain.
On resignation: We shall overcome./If we don't, there are always/elastic waistbands.

If you have ever struggled with losing weight, you will find lots of laughs here.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It IS a humor book, not a how to!!, January 27, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sound of One Thigh Clapping: Haiku for a Thinner You (Hardcover)

Why would anyone interpret this book as a how-to, when it is so clearly a humor book? Oy vey! This is the funniest book I've read in a long time. It's about time someone sent up dieting culture. If I read one more how-to diet book, I'm gonna barf!