cover image Eat Fat

Eat Fat

Richard Klein. Pantheon Books, $3.99 (0pp) ISBN 978-0-679-44197-7

Klein, a professor of French at Cornell and author of Cigarettes Are Sublime, wants you to feel good about eating animal and vegetable fat, arguing that for most people the medical risks of obesity have been greatly exaggerated. Asserting that there is a wide range of healthy body sizes, he finds an irresistible charm or an aura of imposing gravity surrounding heavies like Orson Welles, Julia Child, Marlon Brando, Elizabeth Taylor and Roland Barthes. He calls this fat-friendly meditation ""a postmodern diet book,"" and it is larded with playful, self-conscious irony, with literary allusions ranging from Shakespeare to Raymond Carver, as it tracks cycles of fat and thin worship, from prehistoric figurines of plump, fertile Venuses to svelte Nefertiti to the enormously corpulent President William Taft. Klein's freewheeling smorgasbord samples Americans' eating habits, supermarket labels, word origins (fat, vat, tub, etc.), the biochemistry of dieting. His investigation of the politics of fat leads from Nero, Louis XIV and weight-gaining President Clinton (who overeats under stress) to adipose byways like the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance; Fat Girl, a magazine for and about fat lesbians; and the heterosexual 'zine Plumpers. While his inquiry may not persuade the weight-conscious to stop slimming, it effectively challenges fatphobia and conventional ideas of beauty. Photos. (Nov.)