Beauty and the Beast by Deborah Apy

Beauty and the Beast by Deborah Apy

Beauty and the Beast begins with the question: Is beauty destined to end in tragedy? Drawing on extensive fieldwork in Colombia, Michael Taussig scrutinizes the anxious, audacious, and sometimes destructive attempts people make to transform their bodies through cosmetic surgery and liposuction. He balances an examination of surgeries meant to enhance an individual's beauty with an often overlooked counterpart, surgeries performed-often on high profile criminals-to disguise one's identity. Situating this globally shared phenomenon within the economic, cultural, and political history of Colombia, Taussig links the country's long civil war and its bodily mutilation and torture to the beauty industry at large, sketching Colombia as a country whose high aesthetic stakes make it a stage where some of the most important and problematic ideas about the body are played out.

Central to Taussig's examination is George Bataille's notion of depense, or wasting. While depense is often used as a critique, Taussig also looks at the exuberance such squandering creates and its position as a driving economic force. Depense, he argues, is precisely what these procedures are all about, and the beast on the other side of beauty should not be dismissed as simple recompense. At once theoretical and colloquial, public and intimate, Beauty and the Beast is a true-to-place ethnography-written in Taussig's trademark voice-that tells a thickly layered but always accessible story about the lengths to which people will go to be physically remade.

Michael Hague is an American illustrator and writer, primarily of children's fantasy books. He has illustrated such classics such as The Wind in the Willows, The Wizard of Oz, The Hobbit and the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. He is renowned for the intricate and realistic detail he brings to his work, and the rich colors he chooses.
Hague trained at the Art Center College of Design in Los Angeles. His influences as the comics series Prince Valiant and the works of Disney, Japanese printmakers Hiroshige and Hokusai, and turn of the 20th century illustrators Arthur Rackham, W. Heath Robinson, N. C. Wyeth and Howard Pyle. Current work includes In the Small, a graphic novel published by Little, Brown and Company. He currently resides in Colorado Springs and donates his time each year to making a poster for Imagination Celebration. The author lives in Colorado Springs, CO.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780030640766
ISBN 10	0030640768
Title	Beauty and the Beast
Author	Deborah Apy
Series	Beauty And The Beast
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Henry Holt And Company
Year published	1983-09-01
Number of pages	32
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.