"Every day, twice a day, I take a chunk of earth from this wall and, well, I eat it." -- from Craving Earth |
 Craving Earth
Understanding Pica -- the Urge to Eat Clay, Starch, Ice, and Chalk
Sera Young
Order Your Copy Now and Save 50%!
We'd like to offer you 50% off orders of Craving Earth during our Spring Sale.
Read excerpts | Read the Table of Contents | Preview the book | Read reviews | Watch Sera Young on CBS News | Sera Young on why pregnant women eat dirt
"Sera Young combines a detective's intuition, a scholar's diligence, and her own joyful, indefatigable curiosity to unravel one of the oldest and oddest of human mysteries. I devoured this book like an amylophage on a laundry starch bender." - Mary Roach, author of Stiff
Sifting through extensive historical, ethnographic, and biomedical findings, Sera Young creates a portrait of pica, or nonfood cravings, from humans' earliest ingestions to current trends and practices. In engaging detail, she describes the substances most frequently consumed and the many methods (including the Internet) used to obtain them. She reveals how pica is remarkably prevalent (it occurs in nearly every human culture and throughout the animal kingdom), identifies its most avid partakers (pregnant women and young children), and describes the potentially healthful and harmful effects. She evaluates the many hypotheses about the causes of pica, from the fantastical to the scientific, including hunger, nutritional deficiencies, and protective capacities. Never has a book examined pica so thoroughly or accessibly, merging absorbing history with intimate case studies to illuminate an enigmatic behavior deeply entwined with human biology and culture.
ORDER THE BOOK |
$29.50 $14.75 (through June 30th) / £19.50 Cloth, 240 pages, 36 illustrations, 3 tables
For more new titles in:
Science
Anthropology
Health
 
|
No comments:
Post a Comment
Keep a civil tongue.