The other night I finished Francine Prose's Gluttony. As I mentioned last week, I received the whole series of seven for Christmas. I enjoyed it and thought it was a good treatment. It goes into the Biblical and patristic roots, and how our sense of the sin has changed over time.
She also does a good job in showing how, in contrast to many classical sins, gluttony is still a sin in modern, secular society; how all of the complex and mixed doctrines about food and the body, combined with food being urged upon us at every turn, has turned everyone just a little bit crazy, and some of us a lot crazy.
The only thing I found annoying about the book is that the otherwise lovely color plates do not correspond to the paintings that are actually discussed in the text.
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