Hot Buttons: Image Edition, by Nicole O’Dell

[This book was provided free of charge by Kregel Book Tours in exchange for an honest book review.]

There is no denying the importance of image in our society. One cannot turn on the television or go to the grocery store without being bombarded with pictures of people and comments about their image. Today, for example, I shopped for groceries only to see a headline showing a country singer having to defend her dieting because she had been accused of getting gastric bypass surgery to lose weight from the level of 150 pounds. She was not that overweight to begin with, so anyone reading such magazines (and it is scarcely possible to avoid such reminders of unrealistic standards of image) would assume that to be attractive one required a certain unrealistic standard of skinniness and perfection and freedom from cellulite or blemishes or anything else, a standard that can only be attained with the help of PhotoShop, would be inevitably frustrated with their own attractiveness.

It is also no denying that we base a lot of our judgments of others based on image. It is a lot easier to judge the image, which does not take very long, and to fail to take the time to get to know people inside. Yet if we are to raise and help encourage others to behave justly and kindly to others, we have to have a standard of kindness that does not depend on looks or image. Otherwise we are the mercy of the unrealistic demands of others as a price for their acceptance and kindness, and we are unkind and cruel to those who do not meet our own demanding standards of image, which only provides harm and abuse to others, leading them to be their own harshest judgments.

In many ways this book is greatly similar to the previous book I read by them about bullying, which was a much more personal topic to me. The book has the same organization into parts that deal with the why, when, and how of image trouble, the most important hot-buttons of image, including popularity, self-esteem, body image, eating disorders, and celebrities and the media. After this comes a Christian approach to dealing with image issues, followed by a nearly identical parent-teen study guide to that about bullying. Those who appreciate one of the books in this series are likely to find the same sort of approach to be comforting, with a sense of familiarity. Likewise, those who read and enjoy this book are likely to find its realism as well as its honesty and openness likely translates well to the rest of the volumes in this series.

There is no doubt that this book should find a wide and appreciate audience. To some extent, we all struggle with body image issues, regardless of how we look, because we all have areas that we would consider imperfect, whether we weigh too much or too little, have too little hair or too much, have too many muscles or too few, or anything else. Whether we are judging ourselves based on the standards we see or whether we hear or see the judgments of others, we all have to deal with image. Whether male or female, we are judged by our appearances, and we must balance a concern to be healthy and well-groomed with avoidance of extremes of dieting and obsession with our body image at the exclusion of other concerns, which means that this book should be of value to a great many people.