NONFICTION
The World Has Curves: The Global Quest for the Perfect Body
by Julia Savacool, $24.99
When journalist Julia Savacool asked women from around the world to describe their ideal body, diverging portraits emerged — from a curvy, Coca-Cola bottle silhouette in Jamaica to a linear, kimono shape in Japan.
But universally, she found, women’s bodies are economic and social indicators. Physiques have different meanings depending on the cultural backdrop: While thinness typically signals wealth in overweight America, it’s synonymous with sickness and poverty in AIDS-ravaged South Africa.
And Western physical “ideals” are constantly being exported by way of beauty products and the images of slim American TV stars. For example, as China’s trade policies have loosened in the past few decades, strict communist dress codes have given way to a culture in which cosmetic surgery is one of the fastest-growing industries.
Some of the sharpest cultural snapshots come to life when Savacool steps aside and lets her sources speak in short monologues.
We meet a naturally thin Jamaican woman who chugs large amounts of milk daily in pursuit of a rounder bottom and an Afghan woman who describes the burka as “culturally comfortable, a feeling of safety in an unsafe country.”
The American “paradox” — we keep getting fatter despite our desire to be thin — is not a new plotline. Savacool pushes the domestic conversation forward by asking how the U.S. recession might affect our waistlines.
But her conclusion that tomorrow’s ideal will ultimately prize fitness over thinness seems stale. Surely, that obsession with fitness has already arrived.
NONFICTION
Louis D. Brandeis: A Life, by
Melvin I. Urofsky, $40
Louis Brandeis is revered as a Supreme Court justice who, dissenting on his own and with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., greatly increased Americans’ sensitivity to individual liberties. Brandeis is also, of course, the namesake of Brandeis University.
But as Melvin I. Urofsky reminds us in this strapping biography, even before going on the high court in 1916, Brandeis had lent his name to something durable: the Brandeis brief.
A brief is lawyer’s terminology for a document that sets out the main points favoring one side of a case. Brandeis’ innovation was to realize that as the world became more complex, a good lawyer couldn’t be content with just citing and interpreting relevant laws and precedents but should also introduce the facts of life — drawn from economics, sociology, psychology and other disciplines — that have a bearing on the issues.
As Urofsky points out, “the brief filed by the NAACP in the original segregation case, Brown v. Board of Education (1954), is very short on legal precedent — because very little existed — but replete with materials related to the harm done by segregation to the minds and hearts of black children.”
Although Brandeis was dead by the time Brown was decided, the Brandeis quotation with which Urofsky closes the book seems particularly apt to the case: “My faith in time is great.”
