FASTING: The Phenomenon of Self-Denial

No one but a juvenile author would begin a book on fasting with an explanation of the process of digestion. Rogers does, then hops quickly to a survey of fasting customs and motives (purification, commemoration, mortification) in world religions from Catholicism and Judaism to Zen and Hare Krishna. (Even TM is dragged in though the practice has nothing to do with eating or not eating.) Pedestrian, often simplistic sketches of Gandhi, Mrs. Pankhurst, Chavez, etc., follow in a section on ""Fasting in Protest,"" and Rogers ends with another called ""Food for Health and Science"" which is mostly a survey of food faddists (linking today's proponents of organic and natural foods with all the other nuts)--though he also finds time for the long-lived Soviet Abkhazians and the cannibalistic Donner party. There are no connections made, no conclusions drawn, not even any qustions asked. We'd abstain.