According to the World Health Organization we are in the midst of a global obesity crisis. Is obesity a disease itself or a symptom of underlying physiological or psychological illnesses? Is it a sign of social excess and therefore not a disease in the medical sense at all? Is it really 'new'? Sander L. Gilman, a leading authority in the social and cultural history of the body, presents a fascinating account of the history of obesity, looking at the changing attitudes towards the body, from regarding it as 'God's temple' to more mechanical and practical concerns from the Enlightenment onwards. In the eighteenth century obesity was understood as a problem of the affluent; today the affluent are more likely to have a personal trainer and a healthier diet, and it is the poorer classes who are more likely to be overweight. Gilman considers obesity in many contexts - including a chapter on obesity in China and the impact of modernization and Westernization on this very different culture. Taking the issue up to the present day, Gilman examines the wider political and social implications obesity raises, considering whether obesity should be cured by diet or surgery, by psychotherapy or economic improvement, by healthier food choices or by social relocation.

Obesity: The Biography (Biographies of Disease)

Science & Math

Gilman, Sander L.

History & Philosophy

Oxford University Press

Bertolt Brecht's Berlin: A Scrapbook of the Twenties

Romance

Von Eckardt, Wolf

Contemporary

Hacker Art Books

Jurek Becker, the author of the first comic novel on the Holocaust, Jacob the Liar, and other highly acclaimed works, was one of West Germany's most famous exiles from the GDR. A survivor of the Shoah-his mother died in a Nazi death camp-and witness to the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, Becker endured most of the trials that Jews experienced in Europe from the onset of World War II to the end of the Cold War. In the first biography of this fascinating figure, Sander Gilman tells the story of Becker's life in five worlds: the Polish-Jewish middle-class neighborhood where Becker was born; the Warsaw ghetto and the concentration camps where Becker spent his childhood; the socialist order of the GDR, which Becker idealized, resisted, and finally was forced to leave; the isolated world of West Berlin, where he settled down to continue his writing; and the new, reunified Germany, for which Becker served as both conscience and inspiration. Gilman was close friends with Becker for nearly thirty years, and his biography is based on unprecedented access to both the man and his papers. As Gilman reveals, Becker's story encapsulates the fractured experience of life in twentieth-century Europe, a time and place in which political systems and national borders were constantly in flux. The life of Becker, we learn, was one of great literary achievement and notoriety, but it was also one of profound cultural dislocation. An important theme in the book is Becker's struggle with his Jewishness, an identity he repressed in socialist East Germany, but embraced after reunification, when he found himself at the center of Jewish culture and literature. Sander Gilman's story of Jurek Becker is biography of the highest order, a portrait of an extraordinarily gifted artist whose hope and courage are manifested in his legacy as one of the greatest German writers of the past century.

Jurek Becker: A Life in Five Worlds

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

University of Chicago Press

This is the first book to examine an emerging new German Jewish culture that has become visible since the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Shoah seemed to have erased the historical Jewish presence in German culture. Since the late 1980s, however, a once-silent and therefore relatively invisible Jewish community of the victims of the Shoah has been restructuring itself, as a new generation of German Jews enters the mainstream of German cultural life. Sander L. Gilman surveys the recent explosion of works by creative artists who invoke their Jewish identity and place at the center of their art the question of what it means to be a Jew in contemporary Germany. After introducing this new generation of German Jewish novelists, dramatists, film makers, and critics, Gilman analyzes the critical reception of the novels of Rafael Seligmann and Esther Dischereit, two of the most interesting younger writers. A chapter is devoted to the issue of visibility or invisibility as it is inscribed in the representation of the Jewish body in contemporary German Jewish culture. The book concludes with a study of the central role of gender in the structuring of Jewish identity and the author's observations on the complexities of life in the present-day German Jewish Diaspora.

Jews in Today's German Culture (The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies, 1993)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

Indiana University Press

Diets and Dieting: A Cultural Encyclopedia

Diets and dieting have concerned―and sometimes obsessed―human societies for centuries. The dieters' regime is about many things, among them the control of weight and the body, the politics of beauty, discipline and even self-harm, personal and societal demands for improved health, spiritual harmony with the universe, and ethical codes of existence. An A to Z encyclopedia, this innovative reference work spans many periods and cultures as the acclaimed cultural and medical historian Sander Gilman lays out the history of diets and dieting in a fascinating series of articles. This volume is a reference tool presenting the historical, popular, and scientific context for diets and dieting from the ancient world to the present. The entries range from biography to large survey essays, which cover the historical and cultural context as well as the practice of dieting. The entries are truly international in scope, and present the context for contemporary dieting culture and celebrity within the longer historical view and across cultures. Sample entries include: Advertising Anorexia Robert Atkins Bariatric Surgery Bodybuilding Brillat-Savarin Christianity China Today Fast Food Fat Positive Gandhi Globalization Greek Medicine John Harvey Kellogg Medieval Diets Paleolithic Diets Vegetarianism

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Diets & Weight Loss

Routledge

Drawing on a wealth of medical and historical materials, Sander Gilman sketches details of the anti-Semitic rhetoric about the Jewish body and mind, including medical and popular depictions of the Jewish voice, feet, and nose. Case studies illustrate how Jews have responded to such public misconceptions as the myth of the cloven foot and Jewish flat-footedness, the proposed link between the Jewish mind and hysteria, and the Victorians' irrational connection between Jews and prostitutes. Gilman is especially concerned with the role of psychoanalysis in the construction of anti-Semitism, examining Freud's attitude towards his own Jewishness and its effect on his theories, as well as the supposed "objectiveness" of psychiatrists and social scientists.

The Jew's Body

Diets and dieting have concerned – and sometimes obsessed – human societies for centuries. The dieters' regime is about many things, among them the control of weight and the body, the politics of beauty, discipline and even self-harm, personal and societal demands for improved health, spiritual harmony with the universe, and ethical codes of existence. In this innovative reference work that spans many periods and cultures, the acclaimed cultural and medical historian Sander L. Gilman lays out the history of diets and dieting in a fascinating series of articles.

Seeing the Insane is a richly detailed cultural history of madness and art in the Western world, showing how the portrayal of stereotypes has both reflected and shaped the perception and treatment of the mentally disturbed.

Seeing the Insane

Psychology & Counseling

John Wiley&Sons, Inc.

A pictorial cultural history of the images and iconography of sexuality in the Western world, from the Middle Ages down to the present. The first book of its type, this beautifully illustrated work contains 328 plates, many heretofore unknown, which comprise the visual tradition of human sexuality. Traces mythmaking about the sexual form, from the early cultural roots of Christianity to more recent mythmaking about AIDS, drawing on material from medicine, anatomy, pathology, art, and literature to show how our idea of the body and its sexuality has been portrayed. Includes new material on Jack the Ripper, and new interpretations on the contributions of Da Vinci and Goethe.

Sexuality: An Illustrated History

Self-Help

wiley

Seeing the Insane is a richly detailed cultural history of madness and art in the Western world, showing how the portrayal of stereotypes has both reflected and shaped the perception and treatment of the mentally disturbed.

Parenting & Relationships

Family Health

John Wiley&Sons

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gilman, Sander L.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Gilman, Sander L.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Gilman, Sander L.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Obesity: The Biography (Biographies of Disease)

Bertolt Brecht's Berlin: A Scrapbook of the Twenties

Jurek Becker: A Life in Five Worlds

Jews in Today's German Culture (The Helen and Martin Schwartz Lectures in Jewish Studies, 1993)

Diets and Dieting: A Cultural Encyclopedia

The Jew's Body

Diets and Dieting: A Cultural Encyclopedia

Seeing the Insane

Sexuality: An Illustrated History

Seeing the Insane