"Body and Identity, years in the making, … is nothing short of masterful in both scope and depth. It shows why we desperately need public conversations about gender, sexuality, and culture to include trained academics. Indeed, very few academic researchers can dedicate years, perhaps decades, of intense research and reading to produce a comprehensive book like this one, which could never have come to fruition otherwise. Combining intellectual history and theology, cultural analysis and biology, psychology and literary reflections, Franks shows that how we think about our bodies is inextricably connected to questions of identity."