A Pilates Primer or More Now Again

A Pilates' Primer: The Millennium Edition: Return to Life through Contrology and Your Health

Author: Joseph H Pilates

This Millenium Edition includes the only two published works of Joseph Pilates. Newly copyrighted, edited and revised, this book makes available in one volume all of his early Twentieth Century philosophies, principles, and theories about health and fitness, as well as the exercises, poses, and instructions fundamental to his exciting fitness program. You will also learn every single one of his original 34 mat exercises taught to his own students. Living testimony to the validity of his own teachings, Joseph Pilates shares in these writings his fundamental tenets of posture, body mechanics, correct breathing, spinal flexibility, physical education, and his law of natural exercises.

New interesting textbook: Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 or Scam Proof Your Life

More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction

Author: Elizabeth Wurtzel

Elizabeth Wurtzel published her memoir of depression, Prozac Nation, to astonishing literary acclaim. A cultural phenomenon by age twenty-six, she had fame, money, respecteverything she had always wanted except that one, true thing: happiness.

For all of her professional success, Wurtzel felt like a failure. She had lost friends and lovers, every magazine job she'd held, and way too much weight. She couldn't write, and her second book was past due. But when her doctor prescribed Ritalin to help her focus-and boost the effects of her antidepressants -- Wurtzel was spared. The Ritalin worked. And worked. The pills became her sugar...the sweetness in the days that have none. Soon she began grinding up the Ritalin and snorting it. Then came the cocaine, then more Ritalin, then more cocaine. Then I need more. I always need more. For all of my life I have needed more...

More, Now, Again is the brutally honest, often painful account of Wurtzel's descent into drug addiction. It is also a love story: How Wurtzel managed to break free of her relationship with Ritalin and learned to love life, and herself, is at the heart of this ultimately uplifting memoir that no reader will soon forget.

Publishers Weekly

In her second book, Bitch, a discourse on self-destructive women, Wurtzel (Prozac Nation) admits to writing the manuscript while on drugs and then checking herself into rehab. In this memoir, she expands that admission to its extreme, minutely detailing life as a Ritalin addict and then as a rehab patient. But with its long stretches of descriptions about glass coffee-tables, tweezed leg hairs, missed phone calls and junkie buddies, this new book would have been more aptly titled "Prosaic Nation." Not only does Wurtzel tread on well-covered terrain about getting clean, she manages to add little or no insight either to her own habit or to the landscape of addiction in general. She's never figured out how to be a grown-up and do the little things like scrubbing a tub, she writes, "and remembering to eat and shampoo my hair. It's the basics: I can write a whole book, but I cannot handle the basics." Yet she fills this work with nothing but mere basics, like which cereals she eats, how she feels about television and how tough she finds life on a book tour. Even in rehab, that reliable bastion of craziness, the scenes are ordinary, washed out by Wurtzel's seeming lack of emotion. Indeed, throughout the book the author describes crying or worrying, but never seems to feel anything, so that when she has a surge of gung-ho self-esteem at the book's end, complete with a spiritual awakening, it rings false, a too hasty wrapup. Hardcore Wurtzel fans may find much to enjoy here, but the book's lack of depth and originality will check all but the most devoted. (Jan. 17) Forecast: The toned-down and boring jacket (compared with those of Wurtzel's previous books) and her lackluster writing won't do much for sales. More, Now, Again has scant chances of reaching new readers it just doesn't have the depth and insight of other works on addiction. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

In her second book, Bitch, a discourse on self-destructive women, Wurtzel (Prozac Nation) admits to writing the manuscript while on drugs and then checking herself into rehab. In this memoir, she expands that admission to its extreme, minutely detailing life as a Ritalin addict and then as a rehab patient. But with its long stretches of descriptions about glass coffee-tables, tweezed leg hairs, missed phone calls and junkie buddies, this new book would have been more aptly titled "Prosaic Nation." Not only does Wurtzel tread on well-covered terrain about getting clean, she manages to add little or no insight either to her own habit or to the landscape of addiction in general. She's never figured out how to be a grown-up and do the little things like scrubbing a tub, she writes, "and remembering to eat and shampoo my hair. It's the basics: I can write a whole book, but I cannot handle the basics." Yet she fills this work with nothing but mere basics, like which cereals she eats, how she feels about television and how tough she finds life on a book tour. Even in rehab, that reliable bastion of craziness, the scenes are ordinary, washed out by Wurtzel's seeming lack of emotion. Indeed, throughout the book the author describes crying or worrying, but never seems to feel anything, so that when she has a surge of gung-ho self-esteem at the book's end, complete with a spiritual awakening, it rings false, a too hasty wrapup. Hardcore Wurtzel fans may find much to enjoy here, but the book's lack of depth and originality will check all but the most devoted. (Jan. 17) Forecast: The toned-down and boring jacket (compared with those of Wurtzel's previous books) and her lackluster writing won't do much for sales. More, Now, Again has scant chances of reaching new readers it just doesn't have the depth and insight of other works on addiction. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

What, more? After Prozac Nation and Bitch, Wurtzel finally cleans up her act. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-An excellent, harrowing, horrifying book that YAs will identify with and remember. It's also one of the first lengthy accounts of prescription-drug abuse (for a time, Wurtzel crushed and snorted Ritalin every five minutes, which is increasingly popular among teens). More is thoroughly unglamorous ("I was not a cool drug addict") and often frankly disgusting; on speed, for example, the author began tweezing her legs and couldn't stop until she nearly hit bone; her legs became an infected mess of open sores. The last third of the book-on rehab, relapse, and recovery-is not as strong, but the preface and first chapter alone make More, Now, Again an important acquisition for a YA collection. Whatever her advantages (white, middle-class, Harvard grad, author of the best-selling Prozac Nation[Riverhead, 1995]), Wurtzel is not a "poor little rich girl" begging readers' pity or forgiveness. If anything, she courts their revulsion, while dragging them repeatedly (as she did her friends, doctors, and family) into the hellish world of addiction-deception, blood, desperation, vomit and all-more skillfully and memorably than anyone else.-Emily Lloyd, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Generational spokesperson Wurtzel (Prozac Nation, 1994, etc.) pens a claustrophobic but surprisingly moving account of her battle with drug addiction.