embody: Learning to Love Your Unique Body (and quiet that critical voice!)


Connie Sobczak - 2014
    It emphasizes that self-love, acceptance of genetic diversity in body size, celebration of the unique beauty of every individual, and intuitive self-care are fundamental to achieving good physical and emotional health. It encourages readers to shift their focus away from ineffective, harmful weight-loss efforts towards improving and sustaining positive self-care behaviors. Initial research indicates that this work significantly improves people’s ability to regulate eating, decreases depression and anxiety, and increases self-esteem—all critical resources that promote resiliency against eating and body image problems.Embody guides readers step-by-step through the five core competencies of the Body Positive’s model: Reclaim Health, Practice Intuitive Self-Care, Cultivate Self-Love, Declare Your Own Authentic Beauty, and Build Community. These competencies are fundamental skills anyone can practice on a daily basis to honor their innate wisdom and take good care of their whole selves because they are motivated by self-love and appreciation. Rather than dictating a prescriptive set of rules to follow, readers are guided through patient, mindful inquiry to find what works uniquely in their own lives to bring about—and sustain—positive self-care changes and a peaceful relationship with their bodies.Through workshops, lectures, and leadership trainings, Sobczak and Scott have helped thousands of people of all sizes, ages, sexual orientations, genders, ethnicities, and socioeconomic levels to lead healthier and more meaningful lives by learning how to cherish their unique bodies—no small task given today’s barrage of thin images and emphasis on dieting.Embody offers practical tools as well as personal stories to bring Sobczak and Scott’s work into one’s own life. It is a resource that can be read cover to cover as well as revisited time again while moving through the inevitable changes that come with personal growth. A lifeboat in the sea of messages that demean the bodies of both men and women, Embody is a safe haven for all.

Small Acts of Disappearance


Fiona Wright - 2015
    Fiona Wright is a highly regarded poet and critic, and her account of her illness is informed by a keen sense of its contradictions and deceptions, and by an awareness of the empowering effects of hunger, which is unsparing in its consideration of the author’s own actions and motivations. The essays offer perspectives on the eating disorder at different stages in Wright’s life, at university, where she finds herself in a radically different social world to the one she grew up in, in Sri Lanka as a fledgling journalist, in Germany as a young writer, in her hospital treatments back in Sydney. They combine research, travel writing, memoir, and literary discussions of how writers like Christina Stead, Carmel Bird, Tim Winton, John Berryman and Louise Glück deal with anorexia and addiction; together with accounts of family life, and detailed and humorous views of hunger-induced situations of the kind that are so compelling in Wright’s poetry.

The Politics of Women's Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior


Rose Weitz - 1998
    The Politics of Women's Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, 2/e, brings together recent critical writings in this important field, covering such diverse topics as the sources of eating disorders, the nature of lesbianism, and the consequences of violence against women. With the exception of two classic articles, all pieces were published in the last decade, and one-quarter of the selections are new to the second edition. The Politics of Women's Bodies: Sexuality, Appearance, and Behavior, 2/e, begins by looking at how ideas about women's bodies become culturally accepted. As the writings in the first section demonstrate, this is a political process that can reflect, reinforce, or challenge the distribution of power between men and women. Subsequent sections look at how, once ideas about women's bodies become accepted, they can serve as powerful--and political--tools for controlling women's appearance, sexuality, and behavior. Articles new to this edition include Daring to Desire: Culture and the Bodies of Adolescent Girls, by Deborah L. Tolman; Casing My Joints: A Private and Public Story of Arthritis, by Mary Lowenthal Felstiner; and Holding Back: Negotiating a Glass Ceiling on Women's Muscular Strength, by Shari L. Dworkin. This unique interdisciplinary anthology is ideal for undergraduate courses that cover the body and sexuality. It is also appropriate for introductory courses in women's studies and courses in the psychology, anthropology, or sociology of women; women and health; and feminist theory.

Principles of Marketing


Philip Kotler - 1980
    The 11th edition of this text continues to build on four major marketing themes: building and managing profitable customer relationships, building and managing strong brands to create brand equity, harnessing new marketing technologies in the digital age, and marketing in a socially responsible way around the globe.

The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life


Erving Goffman - 1959
    This book explores the realm of human behavior in social situations and the way that we appear to others. Dr. Goffman uses the metaphor of theatrical performance as a framework. Each person in everyday social intercourse presents himself and his activity to others, attempts to guide and control the impressions they form of him, and employs certain techniques in order to sustain his performance, just as an actor presents a character to an audience. The discussions of these social techniques offered here are based upon detailed research and observation of social customs in many regions.

Hallucinations


Oliver Sacks - 2012
    Much more commonly, they are linked to sensory deprivation, intoxication, illness, or injury. People with migraines may see shimmering arcs of light or tiny, Lilliputian figures of animals and people. People with failing eyesight, paradoxically, may become immersed in a hallucinatory visual world. Hallucinations can be brought on by a simple fever or even the act of waking or falling asleep, when people have visions ranging from luminous blobs of color to beautifully detailed faces or terrifying ogres. Those who are bereaved may receive comforting “visits” from the departed. In some conditions, hallucinations can lead to religious epiphanies or even the feeling of leaving one’s own body. Humans have always sought such life-changing visions, and for thousands of years have used hallucinogenic compounds to achieve them. As a young doctor in California in the 1960s, Oliver Sacks had both a personal and a professional interest in psychedelics. These, along with his early migraine experiences, launched a lifelong investigation into the varieties of hallucinatory experience. Here, with his usual elegance, curiosity, and compassion, Dr. Sacks weaves together stories of his patients and of his own mind-altering experiences to illuminate what hallucinations tell us about the organization and structure of our brains, how they have influenced every culture’s folklore and art, and why the potential for hallucination is present in us all, a vital part of the human condition.

From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America


Beth L. Bailey - 1988
    In chronicling a dramatic shift in patterns of courtship between the 1920s and the 1960s, Beth Bailey offers a provocative view of how we sought out mates-and of what accounted for our behavior. More than a quarter-century has passed since the dating system Bailey describes here lost its coherence and dominance. Yet the legacy of the system remains a strong part of our culture's attempt to define female and male roles alike.