Passing for Thin: Losing Half My Weight and Finding My Self. By
Frances Kuffel (Broadway Books). Kuffel lost nearly 200 pounds in
midlife, but there’s not much in this riveting memoir about dieting
or calories. Instead, with grim humor, she describes her tentative entry
into the Planet of Girls, where she learns to handle dating, clothes, the
gym and self-respect. A hilarious and insightful book.
The Comfort Trap: (Or, What If You’re Riding a Dead Horse?).
By Judith Sills (Viking). Sills, a clinical psychologist, writes about an
underrated problem: paralysis, whether romantic, social or professional.
Fear is at the root, so Sills’ prescription for breaking past
frustration and tedium is mostly about how to confront and overcome
fright. Despite the daunting topic, her style of chummy, no-BS self-help
is both inspiring and funny.
Rapunzel’s Daughters: What Women’s Hair Tells Us About
Women’s Lives. By Rose Weitz (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Remember
when Felicity cut her hair and ratings plunged? Weitz weaves first-person
accounts of white, black and Mexican-American women’s hair sagas
into an interesting, if somewhat self-evident, sociological analysis. She
proves that hair, malleable as it is, can help us follow or defy cultural
scripts. Like a straight bob, the book is tidy, but short on
bounce.
Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the Brain—and How It
Changed the World. By Carl Zimmer (Free Press). From souls and humors to
a lump of wet flesh encased in bone, Soul Made Flesh explores the origins
of our understanding of the brain. Zimmer follows Thomas Willis—the
17th-century founder of modern neurology—and his colleagues in
mathematics, anatomy and philosophy as they seek to define what it means
to be human.
Animal Talk: Breaking the Codes of Animal Language. By Tim Friend
(Free Press). Singing and dancing. Fancy dress and designer perfume. Talk
of sex, real estate, trouble with the boss. It’s not last
Friday’s cocktail party, but the fascinatingly familiar-sounding
world of animal communication. From microbe to monkey talk,
Friend’s book is generous with scientific detail, but keeps it
light with first-person anecdotes and helpings of (sometimes corny)
humor.
Dispatches from a Not-So-Perfect Life or How I Learned to Love the
House, the Man, the Child. By Faulkner Fox (Harmony). Missives from
Fox’s unquiet mind, as she struggles to meet the
intelligentsia’s high standards for motherhood. She hems and haws
over breast-feeding, Gymboree and “the mothers at the park.”
She’s good at conjuring her sassy pre-mom self, but doesn’t
deliver on the subtitle: She’s satisfied only when her children get
old enough to share her interests.
A Brief History of the Smile. By Angus Trumble (Perseus). Actually,
a brief art history of the smile: Museum curator Trumble gives us a full
catalog of this facial expression: mendacious, childlike, forlorn,
decorous, lewd, disdainful, etc. Each entry is accompanied by learned
references to art, but thanks to Trumble’s curiosity, breadth of
knowledge and naughty sense of humor, the overall effect is
delightful.
The Science of Good and Evil: Why People Cheat, Share, Gossip and
Follow the Golden Rule. By Michael Shermer (Henry Holt). Without religion
or God, can there be right and wrong? Shermer addresses this thorny
question in his third book on the science of belief. Approaching the
deeper questions—what is right, what is wrong, and why—as an
evolutionary ethicist, Shermer considers how and why our moral instincts
arose. A bit dense, but an engrossing read.
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