“Beauty and the Beast is an original work, surprising not only in its thesis but in its tone, pacing, and voice. It presents its case slowly and through digressions and returns, performing a way of theorizing through writing, training the reader to follow what’s going on as an ethnographer does—how everything matters, how we should just see where it all goes, and how we shouldn’t overdo it. Gripping, moving, and brilliant, Beauty and the Beast is fun to read and to think with. It punctures an apparatus, producing a great sigh of relief. It is a gift.”--Katie Stewart, University of Texas at Austin 

Katie Stewart

“Against the background of the enormous exploitation and torture of bodies in the course of the war, Michael Taussig, in Beauty and the Beast, seeks to unearth and understand the strange links between the practice of plastic surgery as the ultimate disguise of hunted men and the astonishingly widespread use of plastic surgery for beautification. But he pushes further than that, seeking new understanding of the extraordinary forms and importance of beauty in humans.”—Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University

Alphonso Lingis, Pennsylvania State University

“Taussig balances balletically above the salacious horror, his elegant commentary drawing on Baudelaire, Georges Bataille and Walter Benjamin. We can be sure that when Taussig is telling tales of the savage and exotic, he’s talking about us, here, now, and what our crazy out-of-control economic system is doing to the rest of the world. There’s no ‘rest of’ any more. That’s what anthropology is for: the art or science that shows fish the water. Taussig is renowned as one of its dizziest dialectical conjurors. Reflecting on Wall Street’s recent lack of ‘libido’—he asks: ‘Are there still people who think that money and sex are not the same?’—he provides delicious throwaways that can satisfy Darwinians and Foucauldians alike.”

Camilla Power | Times Higher Education

“In Michael Taussig’s latest work, Beauty and the Beast, he examines the plastic surgery culture of Colombia, where it is fueled by drug and war money. Fighters and kingpins get their faces redone to avoid arrest, and take their girlfriends to be reconfigured with silicone, lipo and a little chiseling. . . . Along the way, he writes about consumerism taking over culture, the flattening out of our ideas of what is beautiful, Marx and Engels, and the codpiece in police officers’ riot gear.”   

Jessa Crispin | Kirkus Reviews

“It’s a kind of fairy-tale unreality, all horror and transformation.”  

Elizabeth Bachner | Bookslut

“This is a highly readable text that in some instances seems itself to exemplify the principle of hybridity, combining a fair range of references to such writers as Benjamin, Lawrence, and Nietzsche, and to cultural movements, such as the baroque, with a studied casualness of tone and style: ‘You really pay your dues with la lipo.’ There is some inevitable repetition, as well as a hint of structural randomness—with comments on fashion, for example, flitting back and forth across the text but, in so doing, reflecting the point made about fashion’s ubiquity. It is certainly a text that mirrors the theatricality and evanescence of its subject. . . . Taussig’s style and tone may be ‘cool,’ but he communicates several sharp insights and startling connections, providing a perceptive and often original interpretation of the extraordinary pace of social change experienced in Colombia over the past 30 years.”

Bulletin of Latin American Research

"Finally, anthropologist Michael Taussig offers a series of thought-provoking meditations on scenes from his fieldwork in Colombia. Theoretically and narratively beguiling—indeed, posed within the frame of the fairy tale—Taussig’s work urges us to consider how beauty is produced in tandem with the economic devastation, agricultural exploitation, and ravages of the nation’s long civil war."

Latin American Research Review