Pretty meager fare, even for a canapé.
A collection of lectures by novelist Prose (Blue Angel, 2000, etc.), part of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins commissioned by the New York Public Library and Oxford Univ. Press (see Joseph Epstein’s Envy, p. 892).
Sandwiched between pride and lust, gluttony never really had the cachet of the other deadly sins, states the author. It was at once prosaic and perverse, conjuring up images of bedridden gourmands salivating over entries in the Michelin Guide Rouge. But Prose observes that gluttony, while no longer to the fore of our religious conscience, is very much alive as a moral failing in a nation where diet has become an obsession and young women tell pollsters they would prefer to suffer cancer than obesity. The author attempts to trace the origins of our attitude to the vice, beginning with a fairly facile exegesis of the Old and New Testaments, where feasting is seen as both a divine blessing and sign of human corruption, and going on to a consideration of the precepts of the Church Fathers, who also ranged widely in their attitudes. As Prose notes, the connection between lust and gluttony was established very early on, with many of the commentaries on the Genesis account of the fall of man stressing the role of gluttony (i.e., the apple) and some even speculating that it was because Adam and Eve broke their fast that they succumbed to carnal relations and were exiled from Eden as a result. The historical experience of the early Christians living in decadent Imperial Rome (whose aristocrats feasted while lying on couches) is also touched upon, as is the medieval cycle of widespread and recurring famine, during which people ate voraciously whenever they had the wherewithal to do so. The author’s treatment of contemporary attitudes (bulimia, fast food, surgical diets, etc.) is a stale rehash of anecdotes we’ve all heard before.
Pretty meager fare, even for a canapé.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-19-515699-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2003
An entertaining and enlightening history of how the practice of cosmetic surgery has been shaped by the priorities and demands of 20th-century American culture as much as by those of the medical profession. To characterize the shift in American attitudes toward cosmetic surgery, Haiken (History/Univ. of Tennessee) notes that when Fanny Brice had her nose bobbed in the 1920s, Americans asked why, whereas in the 1960s, when Barbra Streisand didn't, they asked why not. Haiken's history is full of anecdotes about surgeons and patients, excerpts from the popular press, especially women's magazines, and quotes from the medical literature. It is also extensively illustrated with movie and television stills, cartoons, before-and-after photos, and advertisements—including an astonishing one for a ``Homely Girl Contest'' run by the New York Daily Mirror in 1924. Haiken details how this field of surgery developed after WW I, the attempts of the American Board of Plastic Surgery to control its practice, and the discovery by surgeons that prosperity lay not in reconstructive but in purely cosmetic surgery. She reveals how surgeons who were reluctant to be linked to ``beauty'' doctors found medical justification for cosmetic procedures in psychology: They were curing inferiority complexes caused by patients' perceived imperfections. While facial surgery receives the greater part of Haiken's attention, she also gives a brief history of breast surgery and touches on liposuction and penile enhancement. Perhaps most interesting is her discussion of the use of plastic surgery to conceal or minimize physical signs of ethnicity. Using Michael Jackson as a case in point, she demonstrates the desire of many members of minority groups to conform to narrow American ideals of beauty. A warts-and-all portrait of a medical speciality that still evokes ambivalence in individuals and in the culture at large.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8018-5763-5
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Johns Hopkins Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
A collection of gracefully written short pieces narrated by a thoughtful, sensitive young woman in the process of becoming a doctor. McCarthy, now a pediatrician at an inner-city clinic in Boston, began writing these essays (she calls them stories) while at Harvard Medical School and continued through her residency in pediatrics at Children's Hospital in Boston. Each of these pieces, originally published in the Boston Globe magazine, shows her reacting to a different, usually difficult, situation and concludes with her gaining some new insight about what it means to become a doctor. The formula is simple, but the author's idealism, frankness, and modesty set her accounts apart from the more self-important ones that medical practitioners sometimes produce. The opening piece, which describes McCarthy's encounter with a cadaver in her first-year anatomy class, reveals that the emotional component of medicine is her primary concern. In others, she worries about thinking too much like a doctor, learns how important it is to be able to communicate with patients, and discovers that, even as a student who can't perform procedures, she can still offer aid and comfort to a frightened patient. We also see McCarthy awkwardly touching the boundaries that separate her roles as doctor and as friend. Later stories about AIDS babies and abused children show the painful limits of medicine. The intelligence behind these beautiful stories keeps them from being tearjerkers: There's no shortage of compassion and caring, but McCarthy's control of her material is such that sentimentality never creeps in. By the end, the author has become a pediatrician and a mother, two roles whose synergy promise to make her better than good at both. This delightful book makes the future of medicine seem brighter.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-670-83874-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1994
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