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Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir
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$ 13.24
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| Retail Value |
$ 15.95 |
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$ 2.71 (17%) |
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| Item Number |
456006 |
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Item Description...
Product Description
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.
Outline Review
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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Item Specifications...
Pages 256
Dimensions: Length: 8.2" Width: 5.45" Height: 0.71"
Weight: 0.9 lbs.
Binding Softcover
ISBN 1582432090
EAN 9781582432090
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Availability 100 units.
Availability accurate as of May 27, 2012 08:12.
Usually ships within one to two business days from La Vergne, TN.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | Perhaps..., to deep for most ? May 2, 2008 |
| 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 might as well stick to the bestsellers list. | | | | Ghosts of Toxicity Sep 3, 2007 |
Let's be clear: this isn't some sob-story autobiography about some chick blaming her infertility on the power plant next door. Antonetta has written a gorgeous, unsettling book that pushes the boundaries of literary memoir.
Written in muscular, skilled prose, the "environment" of Antonetta's memoir points to the sludge-filled and strangely seductive New Jersey Pine Barrens of her childhood; it refers equally to the toxic world created by her impenetrable, neurotic immigrant family. Antonetta tells hallucinatory, poetic stories that float between the two environments while never misstepping into the sentimental.
Indeed, it is a rare pleasure for me to read a woman's story--especially one intimately engaged with problems of fertility and the body--that is so devoid of cliche and self-pity. Antonetta has plenty of honest anguish, but it is balanced with a damning dry humor, and a sharply raw perception of herself, her family, their history and the history of the land upon which the story unfolds. | | | | New Jersey "Go Home" Feb 9, 2007 |
| Quite an accurate portrayal of the abysmal state of New Jersey. If America was a person then New Jersey would be its rectum, just slightly south of the tingling loins of New York. It is the wretched, malodorous, poison hole that is the repository for everything wrong with America. IROC's, unabashed italian stereotypes, gold medallions, the mafia, Aquanet and most abhorrent is the diaspora of foul mouthed New Jersey citizens out to destroy other states as they have destroyed their own. New Jersey "Go Home"!!! | | |  | Sounds like nonsense to me. Dec 25, 2004 |
I recall reading the New York Times' smug review of this book when it originally came out. How they must have loved another opportunity to slander the state of New Jersey through misinformation, distortions, and gross exaggerations. The perfect example of how well this propaganda works is the individual from Wisconsin who claims how sad it is that the Pine Barrens have been "ravaged." I wonder how someone from Wisconsin who has probably never been to New Jersey, let alone the Pine Barrens, would think they have the right to make such a comment. Just like other rural areas around the country, the Pine Barrens have been victimized by immigration-driven population growth, yet the region is still beautiful. I have no doubt the author of this book has the medical ailments she claims, yet perhaps they have more to do with her lifetime of drug abuse than with living in New Jersey. My father grew up in the industrial badlands of Bayonne, New Jersey; he is 61 and has no major medical problems. In fact, my family is entirely from Jersey City and Bayonne, two cities that are far more industrialized than Ocean County, yet nobody in my family has ever had cancer. This book is another example of junk science giddily peddled by leftist Manhattanite editors who probably haven't been outside of Manhattan in years.
As usual, the masses gobble up such pablum. | | | | Enlightened in New Jersey Apr 6, 2003 |
Body Toxic, the memoir of a poet, is a great book. Instead
of having us laying in her hospital bed taking her medications
and reliving her miscarriages in detail on every page, Antonetta
almost dances around her illnesses in order to bring awareness
of the contamination to earth that is killing everyone.
Michael Klein said "Poets write the best memoirs." Three years
ago I questioned that statement; after reading Body Toxix, I agree. | | | Write your own review about Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir
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