"Alex Edmond's book Pretty Modern is a remarkable account of cosmetic surgery - or plastica - in Brazil. It attempts to locate cosmetic surgery as a specific cultural practice in a particular location breaks with regular tired debates about whether cosmetic surgery is 'good' or 'bad', explaining instead what plastica means to its participants. The book entwines the views of both patients and surgeons - many of whom Edmonds spent considerable time with - in the notion of aesthetic health'." - Ruth Holliday, Sociology of Health & Illness, Vol. 34 No. 1, 2012 "A masterpiece. Pretty Modern is one of the most nuanced and beautifully crafted ethnographies out there."--Joao Biehl, Princeton University "A fresh, smart, insightful, entertaining and compelling book about a topic--cosmetic surgery--that many of us thought had self-combusted in the 1990s, amid irresolvable debates about whether women who wanted bigger breasts were subjects with agency or duped victims of the 'beauty myth'. Pretty Modern rises from the ashes of those debates to provide us with exciting new ways of thinking about what plastic surgery is, what it means and what it does. It is first-rate anthropology and a wonderfully perceptive study of Brazil."--Don Kulick, author of Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes "This is an articulate and eloquent introduction to the Brazil that we all knew existed, but were afraid to discuss." Latin American Review of Books
