Author: Harriet Brown File Type: pdf A science journalists provocative exploration of how biology, psychology, media, and culture come together to shape our ongoing obsession with our bodies, while also tackling the myths and realities of the obesity epidemic.

Author: Kate Atkinson File Type: epub Amazon.com ReviewReaders who survive the first 20 pages of this dense and playful novel, with its three different openings, constant jokes, and crowded cast of characters, will find themselves rewarded with a leisurely postmodern romp through the student ferment and bodily indulgences of the early 1970s. Although the publisher has called Emotionally Weird a comic novel, it is essentially unclassifiable, both further-reaching and less meaningful than it first appears. Kate Atkinsons book begins with chapter 1 of a bad murder mystery being written by Effie Andrews for a creative-writing course at the University of Dundee in 1972. But the action soon shifts to a wintry island in the Hebrides, where Effie is trying to elicit the story of her parentage from her single mother, Nora, while spinning a humorous first-person narrative of her college life. Only near the end of the book does she finally wrench the story from her mother Effies bizarre origins the identity of her father and the whole unlikely tale of her mothers family.Like a Borgesian labyrinth, with other stories thrown in, including a laughably convenient introduction of magic realism, it is impossible to know what to take seriously--or jocoseriously, to paraphrase another of Atkinsons influences the Joyce of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. In her third novel, much of Atkinsons humor is incidental, even parenthetical. (We are told in passing, for example, that Effies dissertation is called Henry James Man or Maze?) She is at her best when introducing her eccentric characters, such as the elderly Professor Cousins, who is sometimes lucid, sometimes not. As with anyone in the department, Effie explains, it wasnt always easy to distinguish between the two states. The universitys strict laws of tenure dictated that he had to be dead at least three months before he could be removed from behind his desk. Professor Cousins, like the author, enjoys word games along the order of those in Alice in Wonderland, and Atkinsons use of Scottish idiom comes to function as a sort of word game. She also brings in a few killjoys (a militant feminist, a militant Christian, a literary theorist) to complicate an already loopy narrative and to spike the punch. blockquoteJanice smelt of piety and coal tar soap. She had recently become a Christian, a neophyte of a student Christian fellowship whose members roamed the corridors of Airlie, Belmont and Chalmers Halls looking for likely converts (the afraid, the alone, the abandoned) and those who needed to use the Bible to fill in the spaces where their personalities should have been. blockquoteAs Emotionally Weird develops, Atkinson relies more and more on the postmodern gag of characters commenting on the unfolding action. There is no telling how she finally draws these disparate threads onto a single spool, but in the end, even the slightest subplots are neatly tied up and the most transient characters accounted for. --Regina MarlerFrom Publishers WeeklyWhen Atkinsons first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, beat out Salman Rushdies The Moors Last Sigh for the 1995 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, a controversy in the British press ensued. But this imaginative and unconventional writer strikes back at her detractors in her third book (after Human Croquet), skewering the academic literary establishment with understated but spot-on humor, while telling an imaginative tale both outrageously funny and poignantly human Tom Robbins meets John Irving. Euphemia Effie Andrews, a 21-year-old Scot and student at the University of Dundee, arrives at a remote, barren Scottish island to swap life stories with her mother, Nora. Effie comes with a slew of tales about the free-love and druggy chaos of her early 1970s college life, and also armed with questions for Nora, determined to learn the truth about their family history. That is, if Nora is her mother, and if any of the stories either of them tell are true (My mother is a virgin). These are unreliable narrators in top form, keeping readers guessing delightedly throughout. The author uses different fonts to intertwine several narratives, including hilarious entries from Effies, and her classmates, novels-in-progress, while these excerpts are interrupted by Noras snide commentary. Effies academic hijinks may be a bit exaggerated, since shes slogging along on a paper on George Eliot while living with occasional electricity and a continually stoned boyfriend. But truly alarming things are happening in Dundee someone is killing residents of a retirement home, and a strange woman is following Effie. While the narrators constant backtalk can be tiresome, Atkinsons clever and sophisticated prose preserves the voices sparkling energy. Readers may guess the family secret before it is revealed, but that doesnt steal any thunder from the unsettling and utterly original denouement. (June) 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Author: F. T. Prince File Type: epub F.T. Princes Collected Poems 1935-1992 incorporates all the work that he wished to preserve, from his earliest published poems to late, uncollected pieces. Prince has become best known for his wartime poem Soldiers Bathing, a meditation on violence and redemption. Collected Poems reveals the riches of a lifetimes work. His poetry combines a deep affinity with European humanist traditions and a modernist rigour here is one of the essential twentieth-century writers. **

Author: Austin Smith File Type: pdf A new collection about violence and the rural Midwest from a poet whose first book was hailed as memorable (Stephen Burt, Yale Review) and impressive (Chicago Tribune) Flyover Country is a powerful collection of poems about violence the violence we do to the land, to animals, to refugees, to the people of distant countries, and to one another. Drawing on memories of his childhood on a dairy farm in Illinois, Austin Smith explores the beauty and cruelty of rural life, challenging the idea that the American Midwest is mere flyover country, a place that deserves passing over. At the same time, the collection suggests that America itself has become a flyover country, carrying out drone strikes and surveillance abroad, locked in a state of perpetual war that Americans seem helpless to stop. In these poems, midwestern barns and farmhouses are linked to other lands and times as if by psychic tunnels. A poem about a barn cat moving her kittens in the night because they have been discovered by a group of boys resonates with a poem about the house in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. A poem beginning with a boy on a farmhouse porch idly swatting flies ends with the image of people fleeing before a drone strike. A poem about a barbwire fence suggests, if only metaphorically, the debate over immigration and borders. Though at times a dark book, the collection closes with a poem titled The Light at the End, suggesting the possibility of redemption and forgiveness. Building on Smiths reputation as an accessible and inventive poet with deep insights about rural America, Flyover Country also draws profound connections between the Midwest and the wider world. **