You Feel So Mortal: Essays on the Body
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.86 (624 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 022610527X |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 224 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-02-21 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
Feet, bras, autopsies, hairPeggy Shinner takes an honest, unflinching look at all of them in You Feel So Mortal, a collection of searing and witty essays about the body: her own body, female and Jewish; those of her parents, the bodies she came from; and the collective body, with all its historical, social, and political implications. What, she asks, does this whole mess of bones, muscles, organs, and soul mean? Searching for answers, she turns her keen narrative sense to body image, gender, ethnic history, and familial legacy, exploring what it means to live in our bodies and to leave them behind. Over the course of twelve essays, Shinner holds a mirror up to the complex desires, fears, confusions, and mysteries that shape our bodily perceptions. Throughout, Shinner writes with elegance and assurance, weaving her wide-ranging thoughts into a firm and fascinating fabric. Driven by the collision between herself and the larger world, she examines her feet through the often-skewed lens of history to understand what makes them, in the eyes of some, decidedly Jewish; considers bras, brea
Amelia Gremelspacher said "Do we ever know what we look like?". Seldom does a collection of essays weave as successful a thread of meaning and affect. Shiner has the sweetly sad feel for her body, "hauling sadnesses" that we all share at sixty. Her stories are gazing back at the decades of struggling with breasts and noses and hairs that are imperfect to our dreams. It is not a new thing to laugh at ourselves startled in a store window, but it is lovingly told in a way that any woman can understand and embrace. This author has a witty, wry, but kind eye for the body we see in the mirror. It does make you feel so mortal.. Jewish feet! First of all, I normally disdain books about "the body," but this is something different. Among other things, it's hilarious. AndJewish feet? Who knew? Plus, you'll want to see what such disparate subjects as Leopold Loeb, Benjamin Spock, and bra fitters all have in common. Terrific book.. Reader said Witty, warm and compulsively readable. I found this essay collection to be one of the most enjoyable books I have read in a long time. The thread that runs through all the essays is the body, and there is hardly a body part that the author doesn't explore. Feet, noses, hair, brains, spines - they're all fair game. She considers many of them through the lens of her Jewishness, and her ambivalent feelings toward this, and the results are invariably poignant and comical. Also fascinating, as in making her points, the author draws on an extraordinary knowledge of history, religion and philosophy. I learned
This is not a memoir, but we get to know her very well; we emerge feeling we’ve watched a woman grow up and learn some important things about the reach and the limits of her needs and her daring. And, as in the best writing, we thereby discover a great deal that pertains to us.”. “Peggy Shinner writes with self-critical candor and an often rueful wit to combine the intimate with the historical, the deeply private with the Google-able in an engaging, endearing, and wholly unexpec