Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater by Frank Bruni

(Penguin Press, 352 pages, $25.95)

Frank Bruni laughed when he received a call from New York Times headquarters asking if he’d be interested in becoming the paper’s top restaurant critic. Sure, he loved food. The proof was in the size 42 pants he’d graduated to while covering George W. Bush’s first presidential campaign, when he ballooned to 270 pounds. Compulsive overeating had been a habit since before he could remember. At 18 months, he wolfed down two hamburgers and vomited willfully when his mother refused to cook him a third. He flopped at his first diet at 8, binged and purged his way through college, and was just overcoming the shame of his Bush bloat when the restaurant beat was waved before his nose.

“It’s a good thing Frank Bruni is such a talented writer,” said Diane Garrett in the Los Angeles Times. Not only did he thrive during his five years as one of America’s most high-profile eaters, his frank new memoir “would be a lot tougher to digest” if its bacchanalian scenes of overconsumption weren’t delivered with healthy dollops of humor and humility. Curiously, though, once he begins describing his five-year tenure as the most powerful dining critic in America, his book loses much of its charm. Its “most affecting” sections capture his Italian-American family and the way their love became entwined in Bruni’s mind with the act of eating, said Michael Kuchwara in the Associated Press. To his grandmother, he writes, food was “a currency and a communicator like no other.”

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Because Bruni actually had tamed his appetite before getting the restaurant gig, said Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly, his memoir is “a little thin on crisis.” What makes the story unusual is that it’s told by a man, said Rebekah Denn in The Christian Science Monitor. While many women have described battling an “all-encompassing relationship with food,” few men have. Bruni speculates at one point that being gay contributed to his struggle, and that his need to be attractive to men caused him to dwell too much on his extra pounds. Maybe so. But his book “will speak to anyone” who has scarfed down a carton of ice cream and instantly “burned with self-loathing.”