Carol Ann Rinzler

Carol Ann Rinzler is the author of more than twenty books on health and medicine, including Nutrition for Dummies, an international bestseller translated into fourteen languages, and the award-winning Estrogen and Breast Cancer: A warning for women. She is a former nutrition columnist for the New York Daily News and has contributed to many periodicals. Speaking about her new book, Leonardo's Foot, she says: "I had just published the 5th edition of Nutrition for Dummies and was looking about for my next project. I started the search for a subject (a moment all writers anticipate with both pleasure and dread)... and then I thought about the foot--inelegant, overlooked, underreported and completely indispensable (it turns out) to our climb out of the caves into modern civilization. While it is common to credit our progress to the evolution of our increasingly more complex brain, in fact, we stood straight before we began to think straight, and our two feet have influenced our language, our politics, our religion, our legislation and, of course, our medicine. Who could resist such a mix?

Ordinarily when I write I sit surrounded by medical books, including almost every single one of the Merck Manuals (I have collected all but two Manuals and all the Indexes). This time I had Dickens novels, the Bible, dictionaries in various languages, histories of the Roman Empire and the Nazi era, anthropology texts--and, yes, medical books.

It was like being let loose in the biggest best toy store in the world."

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