Cal's Reviews > A Return to Modesty: Discovering the Lost Virtue

Another book I really enjoyed was A RETURN TO MODESTY: Discovering the Lost Virtue by Wendy Shalit. Published in 2000, I found her insight prescient and a refreshing counterweight to bombardment of exposed flesh that seemed to have reached a crescendo in the summer of 2004. In commenting on this book I must walk a careful line between sounding like a religious zealot demanding women be covered from head to toe and a letch lurking outside the local high school leering at the teenage girls.

Shalit writes intelligently about modesty and the effects of its absence. The effects she addresses in the book (according to my memory; please correct me if I am wrong) are mostly concerned with the trend of immodesty and the misery it brings to young women. I would have liked her thoughts on the effects all that skin has had on the male population as well. Either way, I think this is a book dealing with an important issue in a way that is both philosophically robust and approachable.