Zaftig, The Case for Curves
 Edward St. Paige
 (Reviewed by The Editor - Rebecca Brown)
 1999 Blue Lantern Studio/Darling & Co.,Seattle WA USA
  ISBN: 1883211174

Zaftig is a Yiddish word meaning ripe or luscious & is commonly applied to curvaceous women. Here is a celebration of paintings & sketches through the ages, together with lively quotations from people of all literary walks of life.

From Mae West to Desmond Morris, Vogue magazine to Kenneth Clark, from Marina Walker to Susan Bordo, from Albert Durer to Lynda Nead, Edward St. Paige weaves a thought-provoking testament for the case of the voluptuous.

With reproductions of pen & ink drawings, early photographs, advertisements & postcards, posters & full color paintings from masters such as Rubens & Rembrandt, Renoir & Picasso, De Lempicka & Bryers, Kent & Kustodiev, Edward St. Paige offers us a cornucopia of curvaceousness.

St. Paige also gives us a brief history into The Cult of Thinness which befell us after the War to End All Wars & made its resurgence in the 1960s.

Anne Scott Beller's quote from her book Fat and Thin(1977) sums up the reason for this charming & colorful dedication to shapely women: There are fashions in human beauty as there are in clothes and architecture, and the ideal of female fleshiness did not survive the turn of the present century. Of the many changes in public taste and standards that have meanwhile taken place, perhaps none is as thoroughgoing as the change from the publicly canonized version of what constitutes a desirable female body shape.

A veritable feast for mind & eyes, this book yearns to be given to every woman of statuesque proportions & every teenage girl contemplating the allure of skinny-ness.

A delightful melange of thoughts & pictures rejoicing in the beauty of full-bodied women at home in the landscape of their lives. The only works I could think of as missing were Sir Matthew Smith's rosy nudes & Henry Moore's magnificent statues.

Also by Edward St. Paige:
Ferry Traffic on the Great Lakes; Ice Fairs and Carnivals; G. K. Chesterton and the Labor Movememnt; Dogs in the Service of Their Country; Women in Trollope's Novels; Durer and the Human Body & A History of Dreaming
(06/18/00)

Rebecca