We ate while Mama talked and walked around the kitchen, filling the room with thought fragments. An electric fan purred on the icebox, turning left and right and back again. It seemed to be following Mama around the room, like a face staring in blank astonishment. Mama said: The weather had been cold and wet. Stella's children were beautiful. There were moths in the clothes closet. She had dreamed of her dead sister Katie.

The price of chicken feed was too high. My brother Jim ate dirt as a baby. Sometimes she had shooting pains in her legs. It was bad luck to wash diapers in the moonlight. When you lose something, pray to St. Anthony.

And on and on. It's the war between generations, between husband and wife, between God and man --- told in such a winsome fashion that it evokes other writers of the same school: Steinbeck and Saroyan and John Sanford...but somehow, betters them. It encompasses the great joys (motherhood, fatherhood, pain) and the little miseries (termites, delivery room nurses, good --- or bad --- coffee):

Papa's formula was to scoop up fistfuls of ground coffee, dump them into a pot, and let them cook. Into this brew he tossed the eggshells and let it boil some more, producing a kind of coffee soup. It was ferocious coffee, eating up fresh cream with scarcely any change in color. When you stirred it up, your spoon stumbled over gravel and suspicious minutæ came to the top and sank again. Cooked egg white floated before your eyes, and you kept spitting out chips of eggshell. It was, in short, a hell of a mess.

    What do they all have to do with each other? The thesis is that one must subtract the institutional definition of architecture in order to redefine it and expand its horizons. With almost two hundred pages --- including three hundred photographs and drawings --- Wines carries us from the theories of Vitruvius (First Century, B.C.) to Isamu Noguchi's "Pyramical Memorial to Be Visible from Mars."

   This is not an easy work, for Wines does not institute the expected (and well-deserved) attack on the International Movement which has eviscerated, murdered and rendered sterile America's core cities: one of his favored monuments remains Le Corbusier's Villa Savoie in Poissy-sur-Seine, France, or the Plan Voisin proposal for Paris (dozens of high-rise, cross-shaped buildings looking exactly like Lefrak City in Queens).

   There's not just architecture here, but poetry, painting, sculpture, and graffiti (he calls the latter "a link between art and danger"). He sees a moral imperative in all art, and thus he tends to see architecture in religious terms:

Like Gothic religious architecture, Gaudí's work expressed a sense of the precarious balance between good and evil and the conflicts inherent in human choice. But Gaudí's most original expression of this was in his treatment of structural tensions, rather than in illustrative iconography. In his Güell Colony Chapel...every element of the building appears to be ready to collapse, or in his tilted columns for the Güell Park viaduct, which seem completely incapable of bearing the weight of the land mass above.

This multilevel structure exemplifies the concept of de-architecture. It is a viable response to an imperfect world --- a world of too many people trying to occupy too little land surface and takes into consideration the important human need for identity and communication...Like clothing, the home is a reflection of oneself to others. The standard architect-designed high-rise block of today thwarts this self-expression by encouraging inhabitants to indulge in their greatest collective defect --- the submission to conformity.

I wanted the heights, the excitement. And I didn't find them, not in sex, not in life, not in anything --- except l found them in food. Food makes me high, gives me glamour and gives me excitement, all the things I thought I wanted. When I am eating, I don't think about becoming heavy. I am completely absorbed in the glamour or the excitement of food. I only eat in restaurants that are very glamorous, chic, or very ethnic. It has to have some kind of exotic quality or must be gourmet, the best, the very best of this particular kind of food.

Salvadore Minuchin said that anorexics do what they do in order to take control of their own bodies. They are exerting power over the only thing remaining to them --- their mouths. Their parents have arrogated everything else: all choice, all decisions, all freedom --- probably the child's soul, too. Anorexics tend to be dutiful children, thinking their lives, and the lives of their families, are perfectly normal, healthy, sound. But it's a discordant trumpet in the family symphony.

   Ms. Bruch is a somewhat discordant trumpet herself. She published Eating Disorders twenty-five years ago, thereby becoming a National Expert on anorexia. However, reading her case studies here paints the picture of a ratchet-jaw shrink who might have done better to go into real estate, or term-life sales:

I took up the implications of her remarks. "That's another way or avoiding issues: blaming it on others. You avoid dealing with your own role and responsibilities. Another problem is your tendency to make glib generalizations. This "Oh, I did it in order to avoid disapproval" again avoids the real issue. We are here to examine whether you can benefit from psychotherapy, and for this the way you participate needs to change.

Although slow but important progress was made, her despair took over. About two years later she committed suicide.