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The Obsession is a deeply committed and beautifully written analysis of our society's increasing demand that women be thin. It offers a careful, thought provoking discussion of the reasons men have encouraged this obsession and women have embraced it. It is a book about women's efforts to become thin rather than to accept the natural dimensions of their bodies--a book about the meaning of food and its rejection.
In My Mother's House depicts a profound, intergenerational struggle
between a powerful, politically engaged mother, Rose, and her
spiritually inclined poet and writer daughter, Kim. Framing this
collision are two other generations. There is Rose's mother from
the shtetl, a broken woman regularly beaten by her husband but the
source of the family's stories. And Kim's daughter, a
second-generation, fully assimilated girl of eight at the time the
book begins. Four generations, from the shtetl to an affluent
intellectual household in Berkeley, California, the story is a
historical record and reckoning between the old activist left and a
beginning feminist movement. The double narrative allows Kim to
explore the evolving relationship between mother and daughter, who,
through their storytelling, are brought to a profound understanding
and reconciliation.
For years Kim Chernin thought her activist mother was her role
model. She grew up in a household where her mother, a stormy
revolutionary, organized meetings and debated politics. She was,
she thought, her mother's daughter. Now, decades later, the author,
a California psychoanalyst, finds that it is her father's gentle
manner that has profoundly influenced her. While her mother taught
her that she could change the world through bold action, in large
and important ways, her father sought to make things happen in
small ways. Now Chernin finds herself drawn to recollections of her
father quietly working in his garden, which was, for her, she now
realizes, a sanctuary and a school. Through three personal stories,
Chernin, author of In My Mothers House, reflects on her own
spiritual impulses. Whether she is comforting a dying woman or
seeking wisdom from a Hindu holy woman, she keeps returning to the
image of her father in his garden. That image helps awaken Chernin
to a spiritual awareness and a realization that the world can be
changed through gentle, caring deeds on a small scale - as small
(and as large) as her father's garden.
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