Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir [Hardcover]

Susanne Antonetta (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 22, 2001

For readers of A Civil Action and Silent Spring, a harrowing story of a family, a body, and a place: the Pine Barrens of southern New Jersey, one of the most environmentally contaminated places in the country. The author's family-immigrants from Italy on one side and Barbados on the other-tried to realize the American dream by building a summer escape in the boglands of New Jersey where the rural and industrial collide. They picked gooseberries along the chain-link fence of Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Plant while it released more radiation than Three Mile Island. They rowed dinghies along creeks contaminated with drums of toxic waste-waste dumped illegally by various chemical companies. One by one, they discovered their own infertility, while throughout the area parents were being asked to donate their children's baby teeth to be tested for traces of radiation. Body Toxic merges the personal and familial with the historical, political, and environmental in a way that creates a new genre: environmental memoir, fusing fact and meditation, the intensely intimate and the starkly political. Brave, harrowing, beautifully written, Antonetta's memoir explores an American family in the midst of the wreckage of the American dream.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Counterpoint Press (May 22, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1582431167
• ISBN-13: 978-1582431161
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,129,807 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An environment memoir - poetic, courageous, and insightful, October 28, 2001

By 

Fairbanksreader "Fairbanksreader" (Alaska) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir (Hardcover)

This memoir read like poetry and narrative. I was especially enthralled by the author's attempt to 'read her body like a novel', to understand herself from beginning to end, from inside to out, and then back again. She explores the impact of environment, genetics and family dynamics on self. She shows the classic outcome of shame, secrecy and silence as they collude to prevent one from learning about their history in context to their familily of origin, over time, and in relationship to the environment. This is truly a new genre by a writer who is gifted in insight and narrative and has great courage in exploring herself and sharing her insight with the reader. Thank you, Ms. Antonetta

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Body Toxic, June 18, 2001

By 

Marianne Johnson (Bellingham, WA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir (Hardcover)

Written in a style both haunting and poetic, this book captured my attention immediately. Susanne Antonetta examines the environmental and political issues of radioactive waste, nuclear reactors and chemically poisoned water supplies, blended with excerpts from her memoirs as a child, growing up in New Jersey in the 1950's when silence and family secrets were sacrosanct.

Spending extraordinary summers as a child in a bungalow built by her grandfather, facing the small inlet of Barnegat Bay, the author blissfully picks berries and runs through wide open spaces, taking in the colors, sounds and smells of the area, oblivious to the horrific danger all around her. This book is so personal, so beautifully descriptive and so painfully honest, I am reminded, once again, that the real heroes are walking among us.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars She Speaks Truth, August 20, 2001

By 

Nancy McGreevy (Chadds Ford, PA USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir (Hardcover)

As a former Ocean County resident involved in both the Ciba Geigy and Oyster Creek Nuclear issues from 1970 until about 1995, I have to say that Susann Antonetta has written a classic. She writes with enormous grace and piercing honesty about subjects I know to be true. The book successfully weaves the intricate contradictions American life provides those of us who educated ourselves out of blue collar New Jersey towns only to face how little our lives meant to those making decisions about what and where to manufacture and dump.