Overall, I liked this book quite a lot. It traces anorexia nervosa from its 19th-century roots to the 1980s.

I typically hate books intended to “explain” something or other to a mass audience–the authors tend to take a sensational, emotionally charged position and to ride it to its limit and beyond despite any evidence to the contrary. Brunberg did very little of that, particularly in her coverage of historical anorexia. In fact, it is exactly that coverage that so impressed me. Most people–even professional historians–who try to approach a specific theme over time usually end up distorting the times they attempt to represent out of all all recognition due to lack of perspective and lack of a breadth of expertise sufficiently broad to understand the periods well enough to place an event within its context in a culture. Brunberg, for the most part, understood the eras she dealt with remarkably well–her understanding of fasting in the Middle Ages is incredibly insightful, for instance, a thing that is amazingly rare when dealing with a phenomenon so far removed from our world.

There were some areas that are a little weak. For example, she tried to make the social language of food in an environment of surplus a uniquely modern Western phenomenon, when food was perhaps even MORE important (and just as available) among the upper classes of just about every traditional civilization. If we’re looking for the roots of unhealthy attitudes toward food and body image, you have to look no farther than the ritualized vomiting of late Roman feasts or the incredibly elaborate, symbolic, and sumptuous banquets of traditional China. So I find her explanation of the appearance of anorexia in that way fundamentally insufficient.

Her grasp of the conflicts of mysticism and rationalism was quite good, too, though she drew the line badly (putting religion almost by default on the mystical side when there were many devout Protestants who loathed mysticism as a Catholic or “New Age,” as we now call it, phenomenon).

Her representation of medicine in Victorian society is dead-on, and the book is very well worth reading for that reason alone–sort of like “the whole of the system through a keyhole”–an intimate kind of study.

The book actually begins to fall apart more in the coverage of the contemporary–to the date of publication–manifestations of anorexia nervosa. She got the body image issues down pat, but the ideas of control and rebellion, of manipulation and anger just sort of fall away. I suppose 19th-c girls were supposed to feel these things, but not the emancipated woman of the 1980s. Whatever her reason, dropping this thread makes the book become an anemic look-what-the-media-is-doing-to-our-girls stereotype at the end, which does the rest of her excellent scholarship a great disservice.

People interested in history will enjoy reading this book for a glimpse into the medical and social world of the Victorians from a very different angle than that which is normally represented in books. Historical writers might find inspiration for a character among the historical case-studies and descriptions of physicians and patients. The book is also, importantly, well-written, so the read will be easy a pleasant, no matter what your reason for reading it. And most critically, I think, it isn’t “dumbed down”–unlike SO many modern authors, Brunberg is not afraid to give a complicated answer to a complicated question.

As a preamble, I will say quite definitely that Terry Pratchett is a brilliant writer. He’s been a hardback auto-buy for me for years–part of a very short and privileged list. But the level of devotion to him among his fellow professional writers is amazing. Everyone seems to love him. And despite his brilliance, it makes me wonder why.

See, there are a fair number of other brilliant writers out there, but no one else seems to hold the same appeal. And Terry Pratchett isn’t entirely without fault. He has a great grasp of language and a fabulous storytelling sense. But he reuses jokes. He repeats words clumsily instead of for effect sometimes, which can be quite evident in his very spare, simple style. He can verge on the didactic. Sometimes, his incredibly crafted endings just don’t quite work. And most of his books have the same or very similar messages.

Remember, I love this guy’s books, and I was bereft when his publishing schedule changed so he no longer came out every November–November’s my birthday, so it always felt like a present! But he’s not perfect. No one is. So why is he so widely beloved among authors when other writers who are just as talented with just as much potential mass appeal aren’t?

Well, the reason’s simpler than you might think. We writers are an egocentric lot, and Pratchett tells us the one thing guaranteed to earn our never-ending adoration. He tells us that human reality is made up of stories and that storytelling is, therefore, the most powerful force in human existence. He considers mankind to be homo fabulis. So who would be the most important people in the world? That’s right. The people making up the stories!

It is a very alluring idea to authors in particular, and it’s certainly not entirely wrong. After all, much of how we define ourselves as a society is based on the fictions that we tell ourselves about others and our own past. We lie to ourselves about the Victorian era (stuffy and repressed!) and the middle ages (socially repressive and backward!) to portray ourselves in contrast. We lie to ourselves about the Romans (noble and intrepid) and the Greeks (democratically just and scientifically minded) to associate ourselves with an imaginary golden age. We lie to ourselves about what science is now, about biology and psychology, and about medicine–all to make up a story about our present that matches what we want to believe about ourselves. So little of it is fully true, but its falsity doesn’t matter to the internal validity of our image of the world, despite how poor of a representation of reality it is by any halfway critical examination.

And writers… Well, we’re a peculiar bunch. We take a lot of lies, wrap it in a pretty package, and in that way, we hope to get at some truth that is deeper and more universal than mere facts. And society believes this, too.

So Pratchett isn’t wrong, but he isn’t entirely right, either. He does realize this, of course, and has spoken of it at length. His world, the Discworld, is a far better model of a mental world than the real world is. In Discworld, human stories do shape external realities, something that is universal to fictional worlds but becomes explicit in his own. In our world, on the other hand, human stories shape only the mental world, not the physical, and an external reality does exist that is very important to the actual development of society and the outcomes of individual lives.

Nevertheless, Pratchett gives storytellers great importance in his books and, shameless egomaniacs that we are, we love him for it.

Myself included!