I’m impressed with what I’ve read in Mariel Hemingway’s new book “Healthy Living from the Inside Out: Every Woman’s Guide to Real Beauty, Renewed Energy, and a Radiant Life.”

This seems a cut above the exercise/diet bibles by other personalities. I was going to say this book is more earnest than most until I recognized the pun (Mariel Hemingway is novelist Ernest Hemingway’s youngest granddaughter). She manages to follow her depressed grand-dad’s old dictum “Write what you know” by disclosing some pretty interesting material about her messy family situation:

“As the son of Ernest Hemingway, my father had inherited a complicated burden: the genetic tendencies toward addiction and over-consumption; the pain of abandonment caused by the way his father lived and, most tragically, the way he died; and the guilt and self-doubt that come with being the child of a legend, fearing that nothing you can do will ever match what your parent achieved. My mother, by contrast, was very beautiful yet painfully bitter. Her first husband had died in World War II, and after she married my father, she resented him sorely for not being the man to whom she’d truly lost her heart. The two of them fought pretty much every day…”

Mariel divides the book into four sections, two predictable, two new. After long passages on food (with chapter titles like “Cut the Crap” and “Eating with Peace and Moderation”) and exercise (“Turn on the Breath” and “Bring it to the Mat”), she writes about the importance of silence (“The Quiet Power Tool”) and a centered home (“Clear the Clutter” and “Create Your Sacred Space”).

I enjoyed the discussion of silence because it was broad and encompassed what Hemingway calls “noisy food.” Her list of common noisy foods to eliminate from the daily diet are tea, coffee, alcohol, chocolate, bread or baked treats, chips, fruity candy, mints, gum, and ice cream. She writes: “Habitually consuming foods with artificially high sugar and salt levels, with additives like MSG to give everything a kick…will dull the sensitivity of your taste buds and change your expectations of how food should taste….That’s the reason people sometimes complain, ‘Healthy food is boring!’ It’s not the food that’s boring, it’s that their ability to perceive subtle flavors has fled.”

Much as some people may want to discount her (the book features photos of her looking foxy in her forties, doing yoga by a pool), she makes many serious points. You can find the book here (or at your local bookstore).