By Nadia Colburn | YES! Magazine
When author Florence Williams learned her breast milk contained chemicals like flame retardants, she started investigating what exactly is in a breast and how that body part connects us to our children, our past, and our surroundings.
When Florence Williams was nursing her second child, she had her breast milk tested: It was a cocktail of inorganic chemicals, from flame retardants to BPA. This experience started her research into what exactly is in a breast and how that body part connects us to our children, our past, and our surroundings. The result is her compelling, highly readable, often funny, but also deadly serious book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History.
Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History
by Florence Williams
W.W. Norton, $25.95, 338 pages
The breast is the organ most sensitive to chemicals, especially to the inorganic endocrine disrupters present almost everywhere—in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the cars we drive. As a result, breast cancer is the number one fatal cancer in women worldwide—and it’s increasingly becoming a problem in men. Rather than responding to these dangers with fear, Williams inspires us with thoughtful, well-researched consideration of what others may only want to ogle or avoid thinking about altogether.
Williams adds her strong voice to two connected and important, growing movements: for the regulation of chemicals, and for cancer prevention, not merely treatment. This book is an impassioned cry for a more holistic vision and more collective action to safeguard not just body parts, but the whole body—not just the individual, but also the species and the world that supports us.
Nadia Colburn wrote this article for How Cooperatives Are Driving the New Economy, the Spring 2013 issue of YES! Magazine. Nadia is a writer and teacher of writing living in Boston.
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