While [Naomi Wolf]'s thesis isn't exacty fresh, it is compelling. The strongest sections of her book warn women of the dangers of cosmetic surgery. Liposuction, surgeons allege, is as simple and painless a therapy for fat thighs as taking aspirin to treat the common cold. Wolf reveals the truth: The procedure hurts like hell, leaves the patient's legs black-and-blue and has killed 11 people. Wolf deserves high praise for tongue-lashing the French, who, in the early '70s, redefined normal female fat as "cellulite" and peddled lots of expensive, useless paraphernalia to get rid of it.

Wolf often undermines her points when she departs from facts and plunges into metaphor. Only a recovered anorexic - which Wolf is - would have the chutzpah to compare an epidemic of teenage eating disorders to the Holocaust. And to suggest that anorexia is "the experience of a body living in Bergen-Belsen" is so historically insensitive to the reality of the death camps that it is embarrassing. Still, such writers as Kim Chernin, Shere Hite, Fay Weldon and Germaine Greer were untroubled by the analogy; glowing quotations from them adorn the book's jacket. But perhaps they overlooked that section and turned instead to the favorable allusions to their own work.