Famished

When Rebecca Lester was eleven years old&mdash;and again when she was eighteen&mdash;she almost died from anorexia nervosa. Now both a tenured professor in anthropology and a licensed&#160;social worker, she turns her&#160;ethnographic&#160;and&#160;clinical&#160;gaze to the world of eating disorders&mdash;their history, diagnosis, lived realities, treatment, and place in the American cultural imagination.<BR /> &#160;<BR /><I>Famished</I><I>,</I> the culmination of over two decades of anthropological and&#160;clinical&#160;work, as well as a lifetime of lived experience, presents a profound rethinking of eating disorders and how to treat them. Through a mix of&#160;rich cultural&#160;analysis, detailed&#160;therapeutic&#160;accounts, and raw autobiographical reflections, <I>Famished</I>&#160;helps make sense of why people develop eating disorders, what the process of recovery is like, and why treatments so often fail. It&rsquo;s also an unsparing condemnation of the tension between profit and care in American healthcare, demonstrating how a system set up to treat a disease may, in fact, perpetuate it. Fierce and vulnerable, critical and hopeful,&#160;<I>Famished</I>&#160;will forever change the way you understand eating disorders and the people who suffer with them.<BR /><BR /><BR /> &#160;