Word: macdonald
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Highlight Reel:1. On his fondness for toxic substances: MacDonald was something of an alcoholic, though he might be loathe to use that particular term. His ability to consume beer in impossibly large quantities had been well established at Yale. ("MacDonald, perhaps you could trade this for a six-pack?" one of his instructors had quipped when handing him a diploma.) Recalling his college days, MacDonald writes, "I had fun. Loads of it. And not the kind of fun people look back on ten years later and regret. I didn't hurt anybody. I didn't steal anything. I didn...
...Urban Hermit By Sam MacDonald St. Martin's Press; 281 pages...
...Gist: When Sam MacDonald graduated from Yale in 1995, he didn't go chasing after his dreams. He went chasing after booze. And drugs. And food. By 2000, he weighed nearly 340 pounds and owed thousands of dollars in taxes, student loans and credit-card debt. Cue the "Urban Hermit Plan" - a wildly dangerous scheme to subsist on little else but lentils and canned tuna. MacDonald's memoir recounts the unexpected journey he took, morphing from "Fat Bastard" to "Urban Hermit," taking his readers from Baltimore to Bosnia and back again in a tale of "starvation, hard work and blind...
...birth of the "Urban Hermit Financial Emergency Rotgut Poverty Plan": While the rest of his fellow Yale alums enjoyed high-profile jobs and piles of cash ("It was the nineties, dammit, and they were getting rich. Just like everybody else"), MacDonald did his best to shirk responsibility - including his tax-paying duties. After several IRS agents came calling to collect nearly $2,000 in back taxes, MacDonald began to ponder questions like, "In basic animal terms, what does it take for a human being to survive? Maybe I didn't need to swallow up half of the Rolling Rock...
...book is a memoir and nothing else: After just a few months of eating nothing but lentils, tuna, boiled cabbage and black beans, MacDonald had lost nearly 100 pounds. Still, "This is not a diet book. Why not? Because diet books sell crazy. And by 'crazy' I mean sheer, unadulterated cuckoo. Americans spend more than $50 billion a year on diet products, and they spend a huge chunk of that total on books ... Anyone stupid enough to view The Urban Hermit as a diet book and use it as such will probably die of kidney failure. And deservedly so. Seriously...