Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir - Review

E: The Environmental Magazine, Nov-Dec, 2001 by Katherine Kerlin

Susanne Antonetta describes the poisoned landscape of our bones, blood cells, genes and minds in Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir (Counterpoint, $26). With an intensely personal, wry voice, Antonetta describes a childhood before "environmental justice" was a phrase, when the northern New Jersey coast began to sprout chemical companies and when her body began to be poisoned with toxins.

Surrounded by radioactive particles, trucks full of DDT and a chemically inundated water source--courtesy of Ciba-Geigy Chemical Corporation and Union Carbide--Antonetta and her family received a legacy of infertility, tumors, manic depression and malformed organs. Interweaving journalistic research with a poet's narrative, Body Toxic all too convincingly connects poisoning the land to poisoning ourselves.