Heavy matter

This intelligent analysis of the way our culture views and responds to our own bodies is nothing short of groundbreaking. Abigail C. Saguy, a sociology professor at UCLA, looks at how we talk about fat, obesity and overweight in terms of frame. In What's Wrong With Fat? (Oxford University Press, $29.95), Saguy challenges several ideas of our understanding of weight and overweight, including those that treat it as a problem to be addressed and those that concentrate on attractiveness, an already culturally bound perspective. Saguy brings an uncommon amount of intellectual and common sense to a discussion that is fraught with emotion, mixed messages and anxiety.