"There was a time, believe it or not, when our bodies worked for us, instead of the other way around. In her new book, Bodies, British author and psychologist Susie Orbach examines how science, culture and globalization have upended our relationships to our corporeal selves, turning us from master into slave. Good looks and peak fitness are no longer a happy biological gift, she argues, but a ceaseless pursuit. The idea: People around the world—men included—now treat their bodies as vanity projects: every pore, curve and feature is an opportunity for self-improvement. Instead of a tool for production, the body is a production in itself. In our culture, beauty is an ambition like any other metric of success, and body hatred is the West's silent export. The evidence: How much do you need? When Orbach penned her first book 31 years ago, the bestseller Fat Is a Feminist Issue, bulimia and anorexia were barely on the radar. Now parents digitally enhance their kids' baby pictures, the cosmetic-surgery industry is growing by $1 billion a year, we can genetically screen our embryos, and scientists grow bioengineered organs in labs. The conclusion: As nips and tucks and tweaks become more acceptable, we may no longer treat the human body as a God-given accident of biology, but Orbach implores us to take some pleasure in our bodies as they are—to take them, she writes repeatedly, 'for granted.'"—Jesse Ellison, Newsweek

"[Paul] has stripped porn of its culture war claptrap . . . Pornified may stand as a Kinsey report for our time."—San Francisco Chronicle 

"Everyone talks about health care, but few ask why we're so sick to begin with. Melody Petersen's book goes a long way toward explaining that the people who came up with the 'cures' are actually the problem."—Bill Maher, Real Time

"Robb . . . opens by describing how Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan came to write her groundbreaking In a Different Voice, which argued that for women the idea of the self is intimately bound up in a network of close relationships. Robb goes on to describe how other women psychologists and psychiatrists . . . arrived at similar findings. Disseminating their ideas via consciousness-raising groups in the Boston area, these women regarded gender differences as 'systemic rather than essential' . . . they dramatically revised notions of childhood development, incest, posttraumatic stress and sexual pleasure. Drawing on interviews, Robb mingles her subjects' personal and professional histories with case histories that illustrate their theories, and with the commentaries of other experts in related fields . . ."Publishers Weekly