The Good Body

by Eve Ensler

Book Overview

Botox, bulimia, breast implants: Eve Ensler, author of the international sensation The Vagina Monologues, is back, this time to rock our view of what it means to have a "good body." "In the 1950s,"... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 037550284X
• ISBN13: 9780375502842
• Release Date: November 2004
• Publisher: Villard Books
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Brilliance, in Ensler Form

Eve Ensler is constantly astounding. Her work is thought-provoking and by turns funny and heartbreaking. The Good Body is no exception. A play presented here as a series of essays, it confronts what all women encounter on a daily basis; the ongoing fight to accept and celebrate our bodies as they are, without modifying them to fit some magazine peddler's notion of what is "beautiful." Eve hates her stomach - as she fights with it and struggles to accept it, she meets many other women who are fighting (or have won) the same battle. Beautifully realized, and I wasn't able to put it down until I'd read every page. It is a very tiny book; only about 90 pages, but every one is a stunner.

I liked it better.

Last week, I listened to the audiobook of Vagina Monologues. I was left feeling, well, scattered. They were all on the same topic but it's hard for me to think about female genital mutilation and then immediately hear an orgasm. It was still great. But this week, I listened to The Good Body on audiobook. I loved it. It did not focus on my vagina, which was great because I'm more than just a vagina. I'm a whole body. And Eve Ensler perfectly depicts stories of bodies. It is told through a personal narrative that makes it more pleasing to listen to. At the end, you've been told a good story, not bits and pieces of many stories.

An Evening With Eve

Not long ago, on a beautiful fall evening in 2005 at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Florida, we experienced The Good Body, by Eve Ensler. The performance on November 12th was one that will live with us forever. Ensler was superb both in delivery and performance of her masterfully written script. We had expected the play to be funny and clever, but what we didn't expect was the depth of human emotion and the profundity of Ensler's words. It was like watching literature live. Ensler grabbed every woman in the audience immediately...we all felt the bond of sisterhood as she revealed the nexus of her self-loathing--her stomach. As any woman knows, there is or has been a body part that should be changed, one that is less than our perceived image of perfection. That body part is something that we have focused on, a little while, or maybe all of our lives. After Ensler's immediate connectivity with the women in the audience she then built a window that revealed much of the joy as well as the suffering that we women have experienced. All of the stories that Ensler constructed were based on the commonality that women share, our bodies. Ensler had masterfully woven her personal obsession with her stomach into encounters with wise, humorous, and sometimes tragic women from around the globe. The characters that she introduced us to were as famous as Helen Gurley Brown or as unique as Carol whom Ensler meets in a vulva esteem group, or as comforting as Priya from India. Although most of the characters were delightfully funny and allowed us all to laugh at the part of us that is undeniably connected to the struggle for the good body, there was astonishingly dark dialogue, too. When a few of the deep and wonderful characters reveal a painful core experience, like being rapped by their father or unloved by their critical mother, as a member of the audience you are taken on a journey into the dark recesses of womankind's ugly and painful realities. As a fellow sister my heart ached and I found myself in the place these women had been. When the theatre fell dark at the end of one of these powerful scenes, I felt that the place I was in couldn't be dark enough. There was not enough dark to cover the pain of these women...women just like me. The play and the book are as funny as they are poignant. If you have a chance to spend an evening with Eve, don't hesitate; it will be an evening that you won't soon forget. Moxxy2.com Please visit:[...]

Excellent

Wow! I had never read Eve Ensler before. This book is a little gem of a look at women and how we view our bodies. The author starts off by saying "while there is a war in Iraq, I am worried about my tummy". For women who do not have image issues (all 3 of you) this book will seem silly, but for the rest of us who are oh-so conscious of our bodies and especially their faults, this book will hit home. A series of vignettes from various women, interwoven with Eve Ensler's comments and own views, this book is loaded with insight into how women think. My only negative. It is way too short.

A great read if...

...you can identify with the theme. A good read if you can't. Like the Vagina Monologues, the author, through compelling, candid and touching "skits", urges the readers to release the phantasms of shame, guilt, obsession around their body images. Ensler identifies distorted self-images as more than a trend or epidemic, but as a common attitude among many women, one that often leads to self-hatred and in many cases, self-mutilation. The Good Body is a cry against the insanity of the perfect ideals to which women compare themselves, a plea to stop the rampant capitalism associated with weight and beauty, and an appeal to women to love themselves.