Stand Up Straight!: A History of Posture

by Sander L. Gilman

Our bodies are not fixed; they change over time. They vary with alterations in diet, exercise and illness, and shift as we age. Our attitudes to bodies, and especially to posture – how people hold themselves, how they move – are also fluid. Our stance and gait are interpreted as healthy or ill, able or disabled, elegant or slovenly, beautiful or ugly. In Stand Up Straight!: A History of Posture Sander L. Gilman probes these shifting concepts of posture to show how society views who we are and what we are able to do by how our bodies appear. From Neanderthal man to modern humans, Gilman shows how we have used our understanding of posture to define who we are – and who we are not. The book traverses theology and anthropology, medicine and politics, and ranges from discarded ideas of race to the most modern ideas of disability, and from theories of dance to concepts of national identity. Interweaving the history of posture with our developing knowledge of anatomy and cultural history, and fully illustrated with an array of striking images, Stand Up Straight! is the first comprehensive history of the upright body at rest and in movement.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

607 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 12, 2018

About the author

Sander L. Gilman is an American cultural and literary historian. He is known for his contributions to Jewish studies and the history of medicine. He is the author or editor of over ninety books. Gilman's focus is on medicine and the echoes of its rhetoric in social and political discourse.

Reviews

[Darnell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel bad giving books like this poor ratings, given that they represent an enormous amount of work which I dismiss with, basically, vibes. That said, I didn't find this to be a particularly satisfying work of nonfiction, even though it avoids my usual pet peeve and organizes itself by clear subtopic.

The problem, to my mind, is that information that is factually about posture is not necessarily part of a story that has interesting continuity. Too many sections assemble quotes about cultures over time caring about human posture, but they don't necessarily have something to say about it that's different from all the previous examples. Or the fact that posture comes up in the story of Oedipus and the Sphinx... technically true, but is it relevant?

That isn't to dismiss this book entirely, but it's a collection of information about human posture, not a unified work that's engaging on its own.

[Samuel · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found several insightful and enjoyable sections in Stand Up Straight (particularly in chapter 6 onward), but as the whole Gilman's work here is so dense and winding, with numerous tangents into seemingly unrelated details of his references, that it's hard to find or support an overarching thesis for the book. He recognizes the difficulty in defining "posture" and includes many frames from which it has been viewed in western civilization (e.g. military order, health, "civilized" society, race, politics, and others) but only in the 10-page conclusion chapter does he seem to try to translate any of these interpretations or synthesize them to make greater sense of how humanity shapes and is shaped by posture. Instead, most of the book felt like a list of historical quotes and vignettes related to posture (some only in a loose sense), organized in a somewhat arbitrary manner, so the result feels a little disjointed and cobbled together. In short, while I can't say it's bad, I was disappointed by what I see as a lack of direction for the work altogether, and think Gilman's best takeaways could have been made with more concise examinations of the individual views that he tries to group together in Stand Up Straight.