The book opens on a happy note. Sir Francis Younghusband, doyen of Everesters, says in his Foreword Everest is the symbol of the loftiest spiritual height of Man's imagination, a view with which no mountaineer will quarrel since it is the very essence of his creed.

[…] you speake you wot not what, you are altogether befogd and benighted in this question.

The body of this book consists of three related case studies, which take up particular problematics surrounding the hermeneutics of the transgendered agent, the askeses of organized weight-loss dieting, and attempts to represent the subjectivity of of cosmetic surgery recipients.

‘There are those two,’ he then said, ‘who were recently arraigned on a charge of high simony. Fancying a monstrance and stealing it and proposing to sell it. They pleaded the usual pagan ignorance.’