TO STARVE AMID PLENTY: The Riddle of Anorexia

That you can never be too thin or too rich isn't quite true. Anorexia Nervosa, one of the most fascinating (and, at the moment one of the more fashionable) diseases that mankind can inflict upon itself, generally afflicts people who are too rich, and eats away at their psyches until they are too thin. The disease causes pubescent upper-middle-class over-achievers--mostly female--to waste away on purpose after their first brush with failure until they starve themselves into 60-pound shadows of their former selves. Characteristically, the anorexics fail to perceive their wasted images and think only that their intentional weight loss will lead them to the acceptance they desperately seek. This is a surprisingly thorough documentation of the ravages of this odd disease, filled with case-history, clinical data, and incisive comment about a society that generates such warped ideas with regard to appearance.