Richard Klein

Background

Richard Klein was born in 1941.

Education

In 1962, Richard graduated from Cornell University with Bachelor of Arts degree in French with honors. Later, he continued his education at Yale University, graduating with Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1968.

Career

Between 1965-1968, Klein acted as a member of editorial board at the science magazine "Yale French Studies". In 1966, Richard started his career as an instructor at Yale University, a post he held till 1968, when he was appointed an assistant professor at Johns Hopkins University. Klein remained there until 1974.

During the period from 1973 till 1974, Richard served as a director of the graduate program in Paris. Also, between 1974-1987, he worked as an associate professor at Cornell University in Ithaca. In 1988, Richard was promoted to the post of a professor at the same educational establishment. From 1990 till 1991, he held the position of a director of Cornell Abroad program.

In 1993, Klein scored a hit for Duke University Press with his book "Cigarettes Are Sublime", which reviewers found to be a witty, erudite, elegiac ode to the pleasures of tobacco, aimed at a puritanically anti-smoking era. This book was in part, but not exclusively, a polemic against the "healthism" of contemporary America, with its tendency to impose prohibitions for people's own good, thus in the process taking away from them their right of personal decision-making. He found, that anti-smoking had been a pet hobbyhorse of past dictators, such as Napoleon, Hitler, Louis XIV, and that tobacco had often been relied on by ordinary people, bravely facing conditions of crisis, by soldiers, facing death, by women, expressing newfound freedom and by artists, conveying their contempt for safe conformity. Klein devoted a large part of his essay to studying tobacco in literature, film and the life of the imagination.

In 1996, Richard published his "Eat Fat". He hypothesized, that obesity may be an iatrogenic disease — a disease, caused by the health professions — and enumerated such dangers of dieting, as amphetamine addiction, eating disorders and early cardiac illness.

Achievements

• Richard Klein is a well-known American writer and educator. He gained prominence for his books, such as "Cigarettes Are Sublime" and "Eat Fat". Moreover, Klein's "Cigarettes Are Sublime" was translated into many languages, including Dutch, German, Italian, Greek, Chinese, Japanese, Norwegian, Danish, French, Spanish, Korean, Polish, Hebrew and Czech.
  
  Also, during his lifetime, he received several grants, including Humanities Faculty Research Grant from Cornell University in 1983 and 1985 and Peace Studies Grant in 1986.

Works

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  • Cigarettes Are Sublime

    ("Cigarettes Are Sublime" offers a provocative look at the...)

    1993
  • Eat Fat

    (In this book, the author traces the older, positive meani...)

    1996