Chernin, Kim - The Obsession: Reflections on the Tyranny of Slenderness

Precisely what the title says. I thought it was an interesting read, although it didn't quite go in directions that I wanted. The book is a great deal of reflection, and while I find Chernin's thoughts interesting, there was definitely a little part of my brain that kept yelling for statistics! citations! anecdotes, for heaven's sake! I think this is my problem with works that focus more on the theory than on the application -- I always want something to back it up, and I'm not quite sure if that is within the realm of literary type theory or not. This seems to be a more theory-oriented book, in which Chernin posits that our culture's obsession with thinness and losing weight is equated with a fear of strong women.

I did like how she compares the vocabulary of dieters to that of feminsits -- the dieters are always seeking to reduce, to slim down, to silence the appetite, basically. And I can see how she draws that to the thought that starving the body is much like starving the mind, starving the will, paring away anything that is socially unacceptable, like loudness and bitchiness. Being not-thin makes one visible; being thin means blending in with cultural expectations, means not standing out. Then she goes down a line of thought about a fear of the feminine being connected to a fear of the female-only power of giving birth to new life, of the roundness of breasts and belly being equated to the mother, and then the book started edging way to close to the ideology of the sacred feminine for me. While I like that women's work is respected and such, I think giving such reverence and power to motherhood can ignore the other areas in which females can be capable. I mean, I am more than my womb, or so I would hope.

I also got frustrated because Chernin was posing this as a sort of universal assumption, and I wanted more of a chance to hear the viewpoint of anorexics and dieters and the like. I mean, it is a bit like the slash argument. One can't just accuse one's opponents of universally disliking females. There's an entire layer of subtley and various voices that I wanted to hear from and didn't get to.

I think I was approaching the book more like a history, when it is a much more personal book.

Cantor, Norman F. - In the Wake of the Plague: The Black Death and the World It Made

Alas, another non-fiction book I'm slightly disappointed in because it wasn't what I was expecting. I'm never quite sure if it's fair or not to judge a book because my expectations have been disappointed. I mean, I read things because of what I think they will be, but one should also judge a book by what it actually is instead of what one wants it to be.

Anyway. I thought the book would be more of a historical accounting of how the Black Death swept through Europe and decimated it, with a nice analytical look at the effects it had on a broad scale throughout society. The book mostly skips over the actual happenings of the plague and focuses more on the aftermath, which makes sense, what with the title and all. It takes some snapshot looks at how the plague affected individual lives, from Princess Joan of England to the clergyman Thomas Bradwardine. I don't think I'm quite so used to this manner of history, particularly when the microscopic looks at the plague's effects aren't cushioned by some sort of gigantic society-wide analysis. It wasn't so much the scope. It was more that he used this scope and jumped around using it to look at various aspects of society that the plague affected. So I felt like I was only seeing tiny snapshots of a giant impact, instead of closely following the impact of the plague on a tiny portion of society, or looking at society as a whole.

It was eminently readable, though, and Cantor has a sense of humor, which helped a lot.

But.. well, I wanted to know how the plague made its way through Europe and to read about all the devastation it caused, and Cantor was more interested in telling me how it may have affected society in the long term.