Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | 178 PRO | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
In America, notes acclaimed novelist Francine Prose, we are obsessed with food and diet. And what is this obsession with food except a struggle between sin and virtue, overeating and self-control--a struggle with the fierce temptations of gluttony.
In Gluttony, Francine Prose serves up a marvelous banquet of witty and engaging observations on this most delicious of deadly sins. She traces how our notions of gluttony have evolved along with our ideas about salvation and damnation, health and illness, life and death. Offering a lively smorgasbord that ranges from Augustine's Confessions and Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale, to Petronius's Satyricon and Dante's Inferno, she shows that gluttony was in medieval times a deeply spiritual matter, but today we have transformed gluttony from a sin into an illness--it is the horrors of cholesterol and the perils of red meat that we demonize. Indeed, the modern take on gluttony is that we overeat out of compulsion, self-destructiveness, or to avoid intimacy and social contact. But gluttony, Prose reminds us, is also an affirmation of pleasure and of passion. She ends the book with a discussion of M.F.K. Fisher's idiosyncratic defense of one of the great heroes of gluttony, Diamond Jim Brady, whose stomach was six times normal size.
"The broad, shiny face of the glutton," Prose writes, "has been--and continues to be--the mirror in which we see ourselves, our hopes and fears, our darkest dreams and deepest desires." Never have we delved more deeply into this mirror than in this insightful and stimulating book.
Author Notes
Francine Prose was born on April 1, 1947. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1968. She received the PEN Translation Prize in 1988 and received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1991. Francine Prose novel The Glorious Ones, has been adapted into a musical with the same title by Lynn Ahrens and Stephen Flaherty. It ran at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater at Lincoln Center in New York City in the fall of 2007. Prose has served as president of PEN American Center, a New York City based literary society of writers, editors, and translators that works to advance literature in 2007 and 2008.
Prose novel, Blue Angel, a satire about sexual harassment on college campuses, was a finalist for the National Book Award. One of her novels, Household Saints, was adapted for a movie by Nancy Savoca. In 2014 her title Lovers at the Chameleon Club - Paris 1932, made The New York Times Best Seller List.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Originally a lecture in the New York Public Library's Seven Deadly Sins series, this erudite little meditation on appetite and religion matches ancient and medieval texts (Petronius, St. John Chrysostom) with up-to-date references to stomach stapling and Saveur. A confident satirist and stylist, Prose (Blue Angel, etc.) avows her bafflement at the idea of sinful eating and glosses the intervening early modern and postindustrial periods as too contentedly gluttonous-what else is capitalism but the desire for more?-to bother about. Instead she focuses on the morality of the Church, which condemned gluttony in its various forms as an offense against, or at least an obstacle to, godliness. This approach she contrasts with the current ambivalence about food consumption, which extols gastronomic luxury while condemning fat and self-indulgence. Desire for food (rather than the mere need of it) forges a link between body and spirit that seems both inevitable and dangerous: "the wages of sin have changed, and now involve a version of hell on earth: the pity, contempt and distaste of one's fellow mortals." Sauntering through various texts, Prose offers up a wonderful smorgasbord of factoids and apertus, whose chief ingredient is irony. Thus, the religious culture that regards gluttony as a willful sin but must allow even sinners to eat; the medical culture that calls overeating a blameless compulsion, even as it exhorts us to eat sensible diets. She ends in the modern sphere, commenting astutely on the newest (and most ironic) equation of fat with money, whereby profit is derived from the accumulation and loss of other people's weight. A chapter on celebrations of gluttony, from Fielding to M.F.K. Fisher, closes this stimulating, pointedly dispassionate investigation of a decidedly emotional subject. (Nov.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Guardian Review
The doom-mongers who claim we are living in an age of declining moral standards may be wrong, but it is none the less true that sins ain't what they used to be. The seven deadly sins, for example, no longer evoke the dangers of mortality and evil, but merely conjure the delights of indulgent naughtiness. Consider how odd it would seem to those from a more pious age to discover a limited-edition series of Magnum ice-creams taking pride, envy, anger, sloth, greed, gluttony and lust as its theme, as happened last year. The sinfulness of a harmless pleasure becomes a reason to yield to it, not to shun it. Yet this is not a sign of a general disregard for ethics: war- crimes Cornettos or human-rights-violation Viennettas remain unthinkable. Rather, it is an indication of a fundamental shift in how we think about right and wrong in the west. Morality, as a set of prohibitive rules laid down by religious authorities, seems to most of us outdated and empty. Sin has become just another word for the pleasures that killjoy moralists seek to deny us. In place of religious morality we have put an increasingly universal concern for human, and sometimes animal, welfare. Our duties to our fellow creatures, rather than to God, are what motivate us now. So we take seriously rights and the freedom to pursue life, liberty and happiness; but we cannot understand why anyone would think that the harmless pleasures of the flesh and other victimless vices are wrong. This transformation of values provides a potentially fertile context for Oxford University Press's series of seven short books on each of the deadly sins. For those who believe the changes have been for the better, there is the opportunity to rehabilitate some of the sins as virtues. For those who detect a moral decline rather than progress, a case for the corrosive power of the sins we dismiss as irrelevant lies waiting to be made. Phyllis Tickle avoids making explicit claims about the erosion of moral standards, but none the less her essay on greed harks back to the time when it was considered a real sin with something bordering on nostalgia. She brings a remarkable lightness of touch to an audacious review of 2,000 years of western history and the visual imagination, with some close readings of paintings by Brueghel, Bosch and Donizetti. But the thesis which all this serves to support emerges rather obliquely and, if stated plainly, is disappointingly reactionary. Essentially, Tickle is of the view that greed merits its traditional status as "the mother and matrix, root and consort of all the other sins", and that it has been in the ascendancy from the moment Luther nailed his 95 Theses to a church door in 1517. The reformation shifted the focus of human inquiry on to humanity itself, and in the secularised, materialistic world that this led to, greed would reign supreme. She even goes as far as to suggest that September 11, as "both the work and result of greed", was the price the west paid for its post-reformation devotion to wealth and the individual. The echo of an older, familiar complaint rings through her text: the rational humanism of the enlightenment led to a shallow, egotistical materialism. Get rid of God, and Mammon will take his place. It is a critique that too eas ily ignores the injustices that prevailed when religion held a monopoly on morality, as well as the tremendous ethical progress - most notably with regard to sexual and racial equality - that secular society has delivered. By viewing September 11 as modernity's comeuppance, Tickle reveals herself not so much as a shrewd diagnostician of the failings of our age as an example of how the mindset of much western Christianity has far more in common with the fanaticism of al-Qaida than it cares to admit. Both agree that western culture is morally sick and that only a return to an older social and moral order rooted in religion can cure it. That is why Tickle wants us to take the deadly sins seriously again, and that is why, despite the eloquence of her case, we must reject it. In stark contrast, Simon Blackburn sets himself the apparently easy task of rehabilitating lust. Since it is more shameful these days to confess an absence of erotic impulse than it is to an excess, to praise "the desire that infuses the body, for sexual activity and its pleasures for their own sake" is to celebrate rather than challenge the zeitgeist. Although Blackburn is surely right to see lust in and of itself as a component in the good life, he could have made life more difficult for himself, and more challenging for the reader, had he not dismissed the problem that lust tends to excess and inappropriateness, simply on the grounds that it need not do so. The charge is surely not that lust must lead us astray, but that it is prone to do so. However, given the brio and intelligence of his essay, this complaint is little more than an ingrate's quibble. This is, after all, the case for the defence. Blackburn manages to make his pleadings witty and thoughtful, drawing on history, philosophy and evolutionary psychology without allowing their collective weight to bog his text down. Joseph Epstein has no desire to rehabilitate envy. Unlike the other deadly sins, envy, he claims, "is no fun at all" and "isn't likely to increase one's capacity for happiness". Yet his essay does provide pointers to the road to redemption. Envy is, he remarks, associated with a conception of justice: we envy those who have what we judge they have no more right to than we do. Most of the time such envy is based on a mistake: either the misapprehension that life ought to be fair or a failure to accept our own failings or the accomplishments of others. But sometimes our sense of injustice is well founded. When it is, perhaps envy is morally justified and, if properly directed, of some value in motivating a fight for justice. Like all the books in the series, Epstein's is both erudite and entertaining. In the fine tradition of the essay, it explores and floats ideas about its subject without feeling the need to give a final or complete account of it. Francine Prose's discussion of gluttony is similarly discursive and inconclusive. She examines how gluttony remains a Bad Thing even though the nature of its viciousness has changed considerably over the centuries. Gluttony is no longer seen as a sin against God, but as a failure to safeguard our health and physical attractiveness. The shift from religious to secular ethics is manifested again, this time without affecting the severity of the sin. This observation raises interesting questions about how the same vice can be conceived very differently in religious and secular terms. Is there perhaps something about certain forms of human behaviour that provokes in us an instinctive disgust, and which we simply rationalise in the prevailing idiom of our time? Prose certainly provides much evidence for this thesis, showing, for example, how gluttony has been interpreted as a form of psychological transference, an idolatry of the stomach over God, a disregard for the welfare of others and so on. The explanations for why gluttony is wrong are so diverse, you wonder if it is a case of the mind inventing reasons to dignify the gut's intuitive disgust. Prose, however, is more concerned to anatomise our contradictory attitudes towards food than she is to explain them.Our culture, she argues, exhibits a conflicted attitude towards gluttony. We worship Jamie in the kitchen and J-Lo in the gym, our polytheism pulling us in opposite directions. To cure a neurosis you must first correctly diagnose it. This Prose has done, but without providing the patient with the remedy. The series as a whole is a wonderful advertisement for the essay and its capacity to explore a subject with style and intelligence without the requirement to establish a final grand thesis. The decision to issue them as individual, deluxe hardbacks is, however, a serious disincentive to buying and reading them all, which would otherwise be strongly recommended. Given the extreme brevity of some of the essays, the sin of greed seems to be at work. Also a little frustrating is the gradual release of the volumes over nearly two years. On the basis of the first four titles, however, it can confidently be expected that the arrival of pride, anger and sloth will provide the series with a consummation devoutly to be wished. Julian Baggini is the author of Making Sense: Philosophy Behind the Headlines (Oxford). To order Greed, Lust, Envy or Gluttony for pounds 9.99 each with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. Simon Blackburn will discuss lust at the Guardian Hay Festival on Friday, June 4. Find further information and book for events at www.hayfestival.com Caption: article-sins.1 In place of religious morality we have put an increasingly universal concern for human, and sometimes animal, welfare. Our duties to our fellow creatures, rather than to God, are what motivate us now. So we take seriously rights and the freedom to pursue life, liberty and happiness; but we cannot understand why anyone would think that the harmless pleasures of the flesh and other victimless vices are wrong. This transformation of values provides a potentially fertile context for Oxford University Press's series of seven short books on each of the deadly sins. For those who believe the changes have been for the better, there is the opportunity to rehabilitate some of the sins as virtues. For those who detect a moral decline rather than progress, a case for the corrosive power of the sins we dismiss as irrelevant lies waiting to be made. [Phyllis Tickle] avoids making explicit claims about the erosion of moral standards, but none the less her essay on greed harks back to the time when it was considered a real sin with something bordering on nostalgia. She brings a remarkable lightness of touch to an audacious review of 2,000 years of western history and the visual imagination, with some close readings of paintings by Brueghel, Bosch and Donizetti. The echo of an older, familiar complaint rings through her text: the rational humanism of the enlightenment led to a shallow, egotistical materialism. Get rid of God, and Mammon will take his place. It is a critique that too eas ily ignores the injustices that prevailed when religion held a monopoly on morality, as well as the tremendous ethical progress - most notably with regard to sexual and racial equality - that secular society has delivered. By viewing September 11 as modernity's comeuppance, Tickle reveals herself not so much as a shrewd diagnostician of the failings of our age as an example of how the mindset of much western Christianity has far more in common with the fanaticism of al-Qaida than it cares to admit. Both agree that western culture is morally sick and that only a return to an older social and moral order rooted in religion can cure it. That is why Tickle wants us to take the deadly sins seriously again, and that is why, despite the eloquence of her case, we must reject it. [Julian Baggini] is the author of Making Sense: Philosophy Behind the Headlines (Oxford). To order Greed, Lust, Envy or Gluttony for pounds 9.99 each with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875. [Simon Blackburn] will discuss lust at the Guardian Hay Festival on Friday, June 4. Find further information and book for events at www.hayfestival.com - Julian Baggini.
Kirkus Review
A collection of lectures by novelist Prose (Blue Angel, 2000, etc.), part of a series on the Seven Deadly Sins commissioned by the New York Public Library and Oxford Univ. Press (see Joseph Epstein's Envy, p. 892). Sandwiched between pride and lust, gluttony never really had the cachet of the other deadly sins, states the author. It was at once prosaic and perverse, conjuring up images of bedridden gourmands salivating over entries in the Michelin Guide Rouge. But Prose observes that gluttony, while no longer to the fore of our religious conscience, is very much alive as a moral failing in a nation where diet has become an obsession and young women tell pollsters they would prefer to suffer cancer than obesity. The author attempts to trace the origins of our attitude to the vice, beginning with a fairly facile exegesis of the Old and New Testaments, where feasting is seen as both a divine blessing and sign of human corruption, and going on to a consideration of the precepts of the Church Fathers, who also ranged widely in their attitudes. As Prose notes, the connection between lust and gluttony was established very early on, with many of the commentaries on the Genesis account of the fall of man stressing the role of gluttony (i.e., the apple) and some even speculating that it was because Adam and Eve broke their fast that they succumbed to carnal relations and were exiled from Eden as a result. The historical experience of the early Christians living in decadent Imperial Rome (whose aristocrats feasted while lying on couches) is also touched upon, as is the medieval cycle of widespread and recurring famine, during which people ate voraciously whenever they had the wherewithal to do so. The author's treatment of contemporary attitudes (bulimia, fast food, surgical diets, etc.) is a stale rehash of anecdotes we've all heard before. Pretty meager fare, even for a canapÉ. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Seven writers have been invited to consider the seven deadly sins, and the results are being published in a promising series of small, cleverly illustrated, and, so far, scintillating volumes. Epstein's recent book on snobbery has met with great acclaim, making him uniquely suited to the task of analyzing envy, since snobbery is based on its cultivation, and, indeed, Epstein is a witty and thoughtful elucidator of this covert and poisonous state of mind. Of the seven sins, Epstein observes, envy is the most common and insidious and the least enjoyable. He discusses various types of envy, the differences between women's and men's envy, Freud's preoccupation with it, and worlds in which envy rages (the arts and academia may be the worst). Epstein confesses to his own struggles with envy over the course of his musings, which grow in gravitas as he moves beyond individuals to consider how envy between nations leads to war and how anti-Semitism can be interpreted as a particularly malignant manifestation of this deadly sin. Novelist and critic Prose brings her keen interest in our conflicted relationship with our bodies to her creatively, even voraciously researched and elegantly argued inquiry into the paradoxes of gluttony, a sin writ large on the body and, therefore, impossible to conceal. Prose notes that the term is rarely used now that overeating is viewed as a psychological and health problem rather than a crime against God. Equally conversant in religious and secular perspectives, Prose turns to theology and art to illuminate the curious history of a sin rooted in a behavior essential to survival. She traces the line between gourmandism and binging and ponders the increase in obesity in our consumer culture and the stigma of being overweight in a society that loves excess in everything but body size. Gluttons now sin against prevailing standards of beauty and health, and the punishment is living hell. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2003 Booklist
Library Journal Review
The NYPL and Oxford University Press have joined forces to produce these two little volumes, which inaugurate a seven-volume series on the seven deadly sins that will be published serially through fall 2004. Measuring 5" 7", these handy little books will all be written by prominent writers and thinkers; the next five will be by Simon Blackburn (Lust), Wendy Wasserstein (Sloth), Robert A.F. Thurman (Anger), Phyllis Tickle (Greed), and Michael Eric Dyson (Pride). With the first two volumes, we see that envy is that secret "sin" behind everything from common jealousy to the bringing down of the World Trade Towers, while gluttony, that most visible of vices, afflicts at least that third of the American population considered overweight. Not unexpectedly, the writing is superb and memorable, with eminently quotable quotes to serve as daily reminders not to be envious or overindulge. Epstein (Snobbery: The American Version) argues convincingly that the "real wages of sin" for envy are not paying attention to our own abilities, while Prose (The Lives of Muses; Household Saints) illustrates the very real psychological and physical results of overeating, which range from poor self-esteem to death itself. Prose's writing is illustrated by 16 graphic works of art from Bosch to Breughel, showing gruesome examples of gluttony, while the text of Envy is accompanied by numerous cartoons (for how do you illustrate a mental sin?). With the insights gleaned from these volumes, perhaps readers will work toward changing our "culture of gluttons" and renewing the clarity of life that envy can block. Decidedly different from Ken Bazyn's recent The Seven Perennial Sins and Their Offspring, which originated as a series of sermons and has a decidedly religious tone, these Lilliputian volumes are highly recommended, especially for public libraries.-Gary P. Gillum, Brigham Young Univ., Provo, UT (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
Editor's Note | p. ix |
Introduction | p. 1 |
Chapter 1 Is Gluttony a Sin? | p. 7 |
Chapter 2 The Wages of Sin | p. 43 |
Chapter 3 The Real Wages of Sin | p. 77 |
Chapter 4 Great Moments in Gluttony | p. 83 |
Notes | p. 95 |
Bibliography | p. 99 |
Index | p. 101 |