Sam MacDonald successfully endures a bizarre (and dangerous) plan for self improvement--living on $8 a week and 800 calories a day--in this harrowing, hilarious memoir
When Sam graduated from Yale in 1995, his next stop was a bar stool. But after five years of drinking and hard living, he weighed 340 pounds, was flat broke, and the IRS had caught up with him. In a desperate attempt to save himself, Sam decided to limit himself to a budget of eight dollars a week and eight hundred calories a day. He called it the Urban Hermit Plan. He thought he would do it for a month. Instead, he embarked on a demented year-long journey, lost 160 pounds, got a career as a reporter, flew to Bosnia on assignment, and met the woman who would later become his wife. The Urban Hermit is a funny, irreverent story about desperate living, as told by a man who should have known better.
I read The Urban Hermit in a couple of hours and found that Sam MacDonald has a very engaging, honest, funny and captivating style of writing and speaking to the reader. In the introduction, he states that:"I was a big, fat bastard. No excuses. No complaints. That's just the way I was."He was having a good time, drinking, eating and hanging out. Things probably would have continued for another 10 years, had not bills and credit card debt began to get out of hand.From that point, he takes the reader along with him on his journey. I was especially amazed at his ability to stick to a radical change in eating and living, that he devised.Perhaps he didn't have any choice or maybe his inate self-respect made it hard to look for an easy way out. Memoirs often give the opportunity to walk with someone in their shoes. This particular memoir is special because the author is a good guy to hang out with. By the end of the book, I was happy that his hard work had found him with much to be thankful for.
