BOOKS IN BRIEF
French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano (Knopf, 263 pp., $22) When 19-year-old Mireille Guiliano met her father at Le Havre after a year as an American exchange student, the man stared shocked at his daughter. "Tu ressembles à un sac de patates," he told her of her new, American figure. A return to the French way of eating and living quickly helped her shed the extra 20 pounds.
Forty years later, in French Women Don't Get Fat, the 112-pound Guiliano shares the secrets of the French way of staying svelte. America, she writes, "suffers from a gastronomic class system unknown in France." Americans "are conditioned to demand and accept bland, processed, chemically treated, generally unnatural foods, which through packaging and marketing have been made to seem wholesome."
To make up for the way we eat, we try fad diets, like shunning carbohydrates or dairy products, which Guiliano calls "unsustainable extremism." We also drink too much juice and hard liquor and eat too many bagels and brownies. None of these habits is healthy--or at all French.
Among Guiliano's many hints are portion control, meal planning (so as not to eat on the go), and frequent visits to the market to avoid a twice-monthly bulk purchase sure to include lots of junk food.
She doesn't insist that overweight women should visit the gym more, but advocates lots of walking--using the stairs rather than the elevator in particular.
Some of Guiliano's advice might be of little use to some readers, like her suggestions that one might order hazelnuts from Oregon after the harvest or make her own yogurt. But overall it's a fun book with plenty of practical wisdom.
--Rachel DiCarlo
The Lazy Husband: How to Get Men to Do More Parenting and Housework by Joshua Coleman, (St. Martin's, 226 pp., $22.95)Despite even the sincerest equity talks that precede a wedding, only marriage and children bring out partners' true beliefs about the domestic division of labor. Almost without fail women who become mothers discover they also raised their hand for extra laundry, dishes, and scrubbing.
In The Lazy Husband, psychologist Joshua Coleman attempts to tell women who feel helplessly understaffed in the household-help department how to lighten the load. (Hiring a maid is never mentioned.) He wastes no time lecturing on the importance of compatibility or harping on decisions past, though he does advise women to reflect a bit before formulating an enlistment plan. Women should ask themselves, for instance, whether their standards for child care and home cleanliness are unattainably high, or whether they "gatekeep," controlling the limits of their husband's involvement by being territorial or redoing his work.
The author's use of business terminology to discuss domestic conflict-resolution may be off-putting to those who would rather hear appeals to love or religion. For example: "While you and your partner may never divorce, your ever-changing standing in the marriage market affects both of your perspectives about your bargaining power." Women seeking their husband's help with housework but having trouble receiving it might increase their "bargaining position" by returning to work to strengthen financial leverage, or by losing weight to become more attractive. Coleman also encourages women to have a "strategy" to implement prior to "negotiations."
It sounds cynical and loveless. But Coleman is a realist, admitting that spouses are not always equally committed to a marriage. Still, The Lazy Husband is his second book dedicated to preserving marriages, many of which start with wildly divergent worldviews. Should a man who wants a traditional marriage and a careerist woman ever marry? Probably not. But when they do, his book suggests, there is something worth working to save.
--Beth Henary Watson