Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir
- Book Review,
by Susanne Antonetta
Amazon.com's Best of 2001
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
From Booklist
"This is the story of a body," writes Antonetta, a body betrayed. As a child, Antonetta loved her family's modest summer home in the boggy coastal region of New Jersey's mysterious Pine Barrens. She and her relatives relished their well water and the fish and crabs they caught, blissfully unaware that the Ciba-Geigy chemical plant was spewing lead, mercury, arsenic, cyanide, and other poisons into the water supply, or that the flawed Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Plant routinely bathed them in radiation. The kids even ran after the trucks that dowsed them in clouds of DDT every week. Inevitably, Antonetta's paradise became infamous for its toxicity and high incidence of cancer, and she now revisits her childhood memories and girlhood diaries in an attempt to understand the life that made her infertile and turned her body into a veritable tumor factory. Bittersweet and spiked with startlingly poetic descriptions, Antonetta's compelling blend of family history and musings on crimes against nature in the nuclear age opens a new chapter in the literature of place and offers a fresh and poignant look at the old story of inheritance. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Publishers Weekly
"[A] harrowing yet lovely memoir."
New Age
"Its insistence on speaking one woman's ravaged truth will leave few readers unmoved."
Book 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.
About the Author
Susanne Antonetta lives near Seattle with her husband and her young son.
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