Born Round: The Secret History of a Full-Time Eater » (Large Print)

Frank Bruni, a reporter in the Washington bureau of the New York Times, now writes full-time for the Times Sunday magazine. For his previous work on other subjects, he was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing and a winner of the Polk Award for Metropolitan Reporting. He has appeared on ABC-TV's Nightline and other programs to talk about the Bush campaign and presidency.

The New York Times restaurant critic's heartbreaking and hilarious account of how he learned to love food just enough after decades of struggling with his outsize appetite.

Frank Bruni was born round. Round as in stout, chubby, and hungry, always and endlessly hungry. He grew up in a big, loud Italian family in White Plains, New York, where meals were epic, outsize affairs. At those meals, he demonstrated one of his foremost qualifications for his future career: an epic, outsize love of food. But Bruni's relationship with eating was tricky, and his difficulties with managing it began early. When Bruni was named the restaurant critic for The New York Times in 2004, he knew enough to be nervous. The restaurant critic at the Times performs one of the most closely watched tasks in the epicurean universe; a bumpy ride was certain, especially for someone who had never written about food, someone who for years had been busy writing about politics...

The Barnes & Noble Review

There are two kinds of people in the world. Not cat and dog people, not chocolate and vanilla. There are, I'd propose, people who will read Frank Bruni's autobiography -- in particular, the scene where he's scarfing precooked Tyson chicken breasts, one-handed, in his car while driving home from the grocery store and think, Oh, ew.and then there are people, my people, who will read it and think, Well, duh. That stuff smells good! And when you're hungry, you're hungry!