Aesthetic Surgery [Hardcover]

TASCHEN (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2005

From liposuction to lip implants, this book explores all the ins and outs of body sculpting, focusing on the artistry of aesthetic surgery and the extremes to which people go to ?improve? their looks. Topics include: ? History of aesthetic surgery (with unpublished medical photos!) ? Ethnicity and aesthetic surgery ? Surgery in movies ? Spotlight on Ivo Pitanguy, the ?Michelangelo of the scalpel? ? Interviews with the world's most famous aesthetic surgeons ? Before and after photos of transformed body parts, from the top of the head to the tips of the toes ? Caricatures and jokes about aesthetic surgery ? Bibliography including links to plastic surgery websites

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

The editor:
Angelika Taschen studied art history and German literature in Heidelberg, gaining her doctorate in 1986. Working for TASCHEN since 1987, she has published numerous titles on the themes of architecture, photography, design, and contemporary art.

The authors:
Sander L. Gilman is distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over seventy books. His widely reviewed monograph Fat Boys: A Slim Book appeared in 2004, as well as his most recent edited volume, Smoke: A Global History of Smoking (with Zhou Xun). He is also the author of Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery (1998) and Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery (1999).

Eva Karcher has been working in journalism for the past 15 years, specialising in contemporary arts. She regularly writes for magazines and newspapers including Vogue, Focus, Bunte, AD, SZ, Die Zeit, and Der Tagesspiegel. She has published several books, and developed new magazine concepts for artinvestor and sleek, for example. She also curates exhibitions and is an art consultant for galleries, companies and private collectors.

Jürgen Müller studied art history in Bochum, Paris, Pisa, and Amsterdam. He has worked as an art critic, a curator of numerous exhibitions, a visiting professor at various universities, and has published books and numerous articles on cinema and art history. Currently he holds the chair for art history at the University of Dresden, where he lives. Müller is also the series editor of TASCHEN's Movies decade titles.

Richard Rushfield is a native Los Angeles journalist. He is founder and co-editor of the satirical review The LA Innuendo, a contributing editor of Vanity Fair and author of the novel On Spec. His is currently working on a history of the Grunge Era.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 439 pages
• Publisher: Taschen (June 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3822830038
• ISBN-13: 978-3822830031
• Product Dimensions: 11.9 x 8.5 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,065,672 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Be-All and End-All of Aesthetic Surgery, November 23, 2008

By 

John C. Deyab "Little Lord Fauntleroy" (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Aesthetic Surgery (Taschen 25th Anniversary) (Hardcover)

For those readers who want the MOST COMPREHENSIVE compilation on aesthetic surgery, the Taschen book is a Must Read, Must See and Must Buy on so many levels: visually, aesthetically, even viscerally.(some photos will make one queasy). Looking at photos (some from historical archives which have rarely been published before) is like stepping into a Time Machine to see through the decades of the Dark Ages of plastic surgery--- the successes, the failures, the logic and sometimes illogic-- behind those surgical geniuses who started to operate, initially, to cure deformities caused through birth, accident, warfare , but through the centuries took their unique craft from deformity to beauty to mythical beauty and beyond-- way beyond what humans could have ever imagined just a few centuries ago.
I highly recommend this book to the laymen, to the curious, to the medical professional; in an odd way, it is like a medical text coffee table book-- the art, the unique photos, the omniscient text will intrigue and fascinate even those readers with minimal interest in aesthetic surgery. From Nefertiti to Gwyneth Paltrow,from Cukor's A Woman's Face to enlightening interviews with some of the world's most renown aesthetic surgeons, the captivated reader will find endless humans/objects/art and artifice to make the mystique of aesthetic surgery come alive, whether one wants it to or not!