Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #393043 in Books
• Published on: 1998-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 352 pages

Synopsis
In this erudite and eclectic cultural history, Marilyn Yalom looks at 25000 years of ideas about the female breast, laden from the start with powerful and contradictory meanings. The 'good' breast (in ancient idols, fifteenth-century Italian Madonn as, images of French Republican Liberty and Equality) nourishes infants or entire communities. The 'bad' breast (Ezekiel's wanton harlots, Shakespeare's Lady Macbeth, the torpedo-breasted modern dominatrix) bespeaks enticement and aggression. In eight thematic sections - the sacred, the erotic, the domestic, the political, the psychological, the commercialised, the medical and the liberated -Yalom teases apart the continuities and disruptions in images of the breast across time. Her journey from Paleolithic Goddess to modern women's liberation movement is full of surprises. The author attends throughout to women's feelings, both historical and contemporary, as we confront the meanings our breasts convey, to ourselves and others, as life-givers and life-destroyers.

A cultural history of the breast must inevitably be read within the context of the male bias that has dominated Western civilisation; yet the breast has had its own autonomous history, often constructed from the fantasies of men, but nevertheless one that expresses the needs, desires and power of the women to whom breasts belong.

Customer Reviews

What you normally does not consider when seeing breasts.
This is very interesting. It is not just about the actual female breast - it is about how the breast have been viewed by, and how it had affected, different societies throughout history. For instance, women in old times handled their breast cancer better because they believed that the reason of the disease was beyond their control (punishment from the gods) while modern women get seriously depressed and thus making the disease worse by blaming themselves for the cancer, thinking that if they only had eaten healthier, had their kids earlier, etc, they would never got the disease.

Yalom tells the tale of the female breast from a lot of different perspectives: the historical, erotical, political, psychological, commercial, medical and liberated breasts are discussed. She identifies different historical trends that indicates that today's obsession with large breasts probably will not last forever (it seems that I share my preference in breasts with medieval France). Aside from the erotical, I have to say that I found the political, the commercial and also medical breasts most interesting, because these are the areas that affects our modern society the most.

This is the kind of book that only can make you wiser. I was surprised that it was so broad in its coverage, as well as that it in so many places actually got me both interested and thinking. In other places I got bored for a while before reading any further. I guess that this book, as many other non-fiction ones, is not really supposed to be read from cover to cover in one effort. Rather, it is the kind of book you read a little in now and then.

Intruiging and insightful
As a man, I found this book fascinating and insightful. Coming from a background in psychiatry, I was familiar with many of the concepts and theories on which Dr Yalom bases her work, but I would nonetheless recommend this book to any non-specialist reader.

The book is divided into nine chapters, which are arranged roughly chronologically in terms of different understandings of the breast, from "primitive" fertility statues to present day advances in women's healthcare. This structure makes it easy to read and helps to introduce concepts in psychiatry and sociology which may have put off a casual reader had they been presented as givens in the first chapter. Unfortunately this also leads to the book's major shortcoming - many of the themes and ways of understanding the breast have persisted in one form or another throughout human history, and by the final third of the book I experienced a sense that the developmental structure had been stretched a little too far. Having said that, Marilyn Yalom has obviously worked hard to provide a cohesive overview of what is in fact an enormous topic.

The book brims over with factual detail, from seventeenth century Flemish tracts against exposing too much flesh to the frequency with which women in Shakespeare are, literally and figuratively, attacked in the breast. Certainly the first four chapters live up to the promise of the book's title. In the end, however, a better title might have been "A History of Perceptions of the Breast", with the bosom's epiphany as its form, function and entire history are claimed back by women.

I have read and re-read this book with pleasure and am grateful for the wealth of detail, and in the end I am reminded of a piece of graffiti, where someone had written "Women's bodies are their own" and underneath another hand had added "Yes but it's nice to share".