Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir
by Susanne Antonetta
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Book Summary Information
Author: Susanne AntonettaEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2002-05
ISBN: 1582432090
Number of pages: 256
Publisher: Counterpoint
Book Reviews of Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir
Book Review: Read it twice, then talk !
Summary: 5 Stars
I feel so many emotions when I think of this book, I mean talk about a onion with its dozens of layers and you start to understand my love of this book. If you can't get it, that this book to me is an emotional plea from deep within her soul, well then you should stick to the bestsellers list. I have never made a comment before on what other reviews have written, but in this case I must make a exception, but than I can not, because then I would be just like them.
Summary of Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir
For readers of A Civil Action and Refuge, a harrowing story of a body and a place--the New Jersey boglands, one of the most contaminated regions of the country.This is an American story. Two immigrant families drawn together from wildly different parts of the world, Italy on one side and Barbados on the other, pursued their vision of the American dream by building a summer escape in the boglands of New Jersey, where the rural and industrial collide. They picked gooseberries on hot afternoons and spent lazy days rowing dinghies down creeks. But the gooseberry patch was near a nuclear power plant that released record levels of radiation, and the creeks were invisibly ruined by illegally dumped toxic waste. One by one, family members found their bodies mirroring the compromised landscape of the Barrens: infertile and damaged by inexplicable growths. Soon the area parents were being asked to donate their children's baby teeth to be tested for radiation.
Body Toxic is an environmental memoir--merging the personal and familial with the political and environmental. Intensely intimate and starkly contemporary, it is a story of bravery and resignation, of great hope and great loss. This beautifully composed book presents American families in the midst of the wreckage of the American dream.
Susanne Antonetta writes with a poet's precision about the almost unspeakable series of ills that have assaulted her body: cysts on her ovaries, a divided uterus, endometriosis, rampant thyroid tumors, a quadruplet pregnancy (no fertility drugs involved) that ended in miscarriage, and manic-depressive illness treated with the wrong drugs until she was in her 30s. There's not a trace of self-pity as she lists the toxic substances leaked into the air, ground, and water by the chemical company, nuclear power plant, and nuclear missile bunker near her family's summer home in Holly Park, New Jersey. She passes over the gruesome inappropriateness of that bucolic name just as she unblinkingly repeats the brutally frank comments of her relatives, who adored her brother and male cousin, had no interest in the four girl children, and excommunicated any family member who violated their rigid rules. "In the end, I'm grateful," she writes of her extended family. "They have given me the gift of clarity. They've released me. There may be nothing kinder you can do than withhold your love." Clarity is among the principal virtues of Antonetta's unusual work, aptly subtitled An Environmental Memoir. She makes general facts personally meaningful by intertwining a historical account of post-World War II America's love affair with heavy industry and its deadly by-products with the specific details of ailments suffered by herself and the other kids who ran down the streets after the DDT-spraying trucks and drank water "full of good iron, good lead, mercury, cadmium, tritium, alpha radiation, good benzenes, PCBs, chlordane, vinyl chloride, lime, mercury, good cyanide." Her scathing but matter-of-fact tone gives the author greater authority as a prophet of the whirlwind we are reaping from careless contamination of our natural resources. --Wendy Smith
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