Fasting Girls

Download or read book Fasting Girls written by Joan Jacobs Brumberg and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2000-10-10 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An acclaimed classic from the award-winning author of The Body Project presents a history of women's food-refusal dating back as far as the sixteenth century, providing compassion to victims and their families. Here is a tableau of female self-denial: medieval martyrs who used starvation to demonstrate religious devotion, "wonders of science" whose families capitalized on their ability to survive on flower petals and air, silent screen stars whose strict "slimming" regimens inspired a generation. Here, too, is a fascinating look at how the cultural ramifications of the Industrial Revolution produced a disorder that continues to render privileged young women helpless. Incisive, compassionate, illuminating, Fasting Girls offers real understanding to victims and their families, clinicians, and all women who are interested in the origins and future of this complex, modern and characteristically female disease.

Download or read book Fasting Girls written by Joan Jacobs Brumberg and published by Vintage Books USA. This book was released on 1989 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anorexia nervosa may affect as many as five to ten percent of adolescent girls in the United States, and on some college campuses, the estimate is as high as twenty percent. Despite its recent "popularity", however, the disease remains puzzling in its causes and stubbornly resistant to a cure. For, as Fasting Girls demonstrates, anorexia nervosa existed long before our current preoccupation with lean bodies. This landmark, award-winning work offers a solution to the mystery of anorexia nervosa, exploring its historical roots from the fasting saints of the Middle Ages and the curious "fasting girls" of the Victorian era to the weight-obsessed celebrities of our own time. By linking broad cultural forces to individual biomedical and psychological factors, "Fasting Girls" shows how a society that believes a woman "can never be too rich or too thin" actually recruits certain adolescents to anorexia -- those who regard a thin body as a state of perfection. Combined with other social stresses, such an attitude puts an increasing number of contemporary young women at risk. Highly readable and authoritative, "Fasting Girls" takes the reader into the private world of sufferers in the past, and also shows today's health professionals and parents why America's young women are so vulnerable to anorexia, and what treatments have proven effective in combating this frequently misunderstood, often deadly, disorder.

Download or read book The Welsh Fasting Girl written by Varley O'Connor and published by Bellevue Literary Press. This book was released on 2019-05-07 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Praise for the Previous Novels of Varley O’Connor “Thoroughly researched and lively.” —Vogue “Elegantly wrought, hardheaded, and tenderhearted.” —Michael Chabon “Honesty and compassion inform every page, and there are passages so musical and full of grace they read like hymns. Reading groups should rejoice.” —Sigrid Nunez “[O’Connor] captures the dangerous intersection between private life and the forces of history . . . and gives the reader that rare pleasure of inhabiting another family life that feels at once entirely familiar and new.” —Susan Richards Shreve Twelve-year-old Sarah Jacob was the most famous of the Victorian fasting girls, who claimed to miraculously survive without food, serving as flashpoints between struggling religious, scientific, and political factions. In this novel based on Sarah’s life and premature death from what may be the first documented case of anorexia, an American journalist, recovering from her husband’s death in the Civil War, leaves her home and children behind to travel to Wales, where she investigates Sarah’s bizarre case by becoming the young girl’s friend and confidante. Unable to prevent the girl’s tragic decline while doctors, nurses, and a local priest keep watch, she documents the curious family dynamic, the trial that convicted Sarah’s parents, and an era’s hysterical need to both believe and destroy Sarah’s seemingly miraculous power. Intense, dark, and utterly compelling, The Welsh Fasting Girl delves into the complexities of a true story to understand how a culture’s anxieties led to the murder of a child. Varley O’Connor is the author of five novels, including The Welsh Fasting Girl, The Master’s Muse, and The Cure. She lives in Cleveland Heights, Ohio.

Download or read book Fasting Girls written by William Alexander Hammond and published by . This book was released on 1879 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book From Fasting Saints to Anorexic Girls written by Walter Vandereycken and published by Athlone Press. This book was released on 2001-01-01 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Down the centuries self-starvation has taken many morbid guises. This story culminates in the 19th century labelling of anorexia nervosa, a condition which has since attracted a host of theories and explanations in the course of which a medical curiosity has been transformed into a modern disease.

Download or read book The Body Project written by Joan Jacobs Brumberg and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-06-09 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The award-winning author of Fasting Girls explores what teenage girls have lost in this new world of freedom and consumerism—a world in which the body is their primary project. "Fascinating ... riveting ... Women and girls should read this fine book together." —The New York Times Book Review A hundred years ago, women were lacing themselves into corsets and teaching their daughters to do the same. The ideal of the day, however, was inner beauty: a focus on good deeds and a pure heart. Today American women have more social choices and personal freedom than ever before. But fifty-three percent of our girls are dissatisfied with their bodies by the age of thirteen, and many begin a pattern of weight obsession and dieting as early as eight or nine. Why? In The Body Project, historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg answers this question, drawing on diary excerpts and media images from 1830 to the present. Tracing girls' attitudes toward topics ranging from breast size and menstruation to hair, clothing, and cosmetics, she exposes the shift from the Victorian concern with character to our modern focus on outward appearance—in particular, the desire to be model-thin and sexy. Compassionate, insightful, and gracefully written, The Body Project explores the gains and losses adolescent girls have inherited since they shed the corset and the ideal of virginity for a new world of sexual freedom and consumerism—a world in which the body is their primary project.

Download or read book The Wonder written by Emma Donoghue and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2016-09-20 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a Netflix film starring Florence Pugh: In this “old-school page turner” (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review) by the bestselling author of Room, an English nurse is brought to a small Irish village to observe what appears to be a miracle—a girl said to have survived without food for months—and soon finds herself fighting to save the child's life. Tourists flock to the cabin of eleven-year-old Anna O'Donnell, who believes herself to be living off manna from heaven, and a journalist is sent to cover the sensation. Lib Wright, a veteran of Florence Nightingale's Crimean campaign, is hired to keep watch over the girl. Written with all the propulsive tension that made Room a huge bestseller, The Wonder works beautifully on many levels -- a tale of two strangers who transform each other's lives, a powerful psychological thriller, and a story of love pitted against evil. Acclaim for The Wonder: "Deliciously gothic.... Dark and vivid, with complicated characters, this is a novel that lodges itself deep" (USA Today, 3/4 stars) "Heartbreaking and transcendent"(New York Times) "A fable as lean and discomfiting as Anna's dwindling body.... Donoghue keeps us riveted" (Chicago Tribune) "Donoghue poses powerful questions about faith and belief" (Newsday)