A simultaneously funny and informative memoir about the wonder of the human body.
A journalist/author explores the whys and hows of the female body as she confronts the “volatile and apprehensive relationship” she has with her own body parts.
Altman (Thanks for Coming: One Young Woman's Quest for an Orgasm, 2009, etc.) grew up with two hippie parents who eschewed all bodily enhancements. Her mother “never wore any image-altering materials” and never shaved; her father “turned his nose up at anything he deemed unnatural,” including perfume. This led to the author’s hyperawareness of corporeal expectations for women and the nagging sense that she was somehow a misfit. Drawing on research and interviews, Altman considers everything about the female body that society often shames women into hiding. In “The Top Half,” the author discusses some of her favorite top-of-the-body fixations, such as body hair and its removal. Her investigations did nothing to cure her of her own depilatory compulsions, but at the same time, they revealed that the reasons behind shaving, waxing, and tweezing were rooted in everything from cultural/patriarchal norms (which equated hairlessness to sensuality) to biology (which equated hairiness to age and infertility). Altman then goes on to ponder other personal issues—e.g., hairy nipples, overactive sweat glands, protruding belly buttons, head lice, and the inability to vocalize sexual pleasure—with which she has struggled. In the second section of the book, “The Bottom Half,” Altman considers what inevitably draws dogs to the human vulva, why buttocks, the site of the grossest of all bodily functions, are also “one of the most sexualized parts of the human body,” and why society too often maligns features of the female body like labial lips (the so-called “camel toe”) and menstruation. By turns neurotically perverse and hilarious, Altman’s doodle-illustrated book is not just a memoir of her own quest to embrace physical imperfection. It is also an endearingly outrageous attempt to demystify the female body while shedding light on the causes of female corporeal insecurities.
A simultaneously funny and informative memoir about the wonder of the human body.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-57483-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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