Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir

Rating:
Summary: She Speaks Truth
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Enlightened in New Jersey
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: Sounds like nonsense to me.
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: An environment memoir - poetic, courageous, and insightful
Review: 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

Rating:
Summary: A first-person story of toxic environmental effects
Review: Two immigrant families from different parts of the world pursue their dream by building a summer home on the boglands of New Jersey outside the industrial zone - and find their family members falling prey to mysterious illness. Science fiction? No, fact and autobiography in Body Toxic: An Environmental Memoir, a title which tells of their health decline and presents a first-person story of toxic environmental effects on generations.

Rating:
Summary: Sad, poignant, and poetic
Review: While "Body Toxic" is an environmental memoir, it is debatable whether the accent should be placed on the term environmental, or on the term toxic. In all probability it should be toxic, because that term is more apropos to the disfunctional maternal side of the family whose emotional problems, while apparently exacerbated by the environmental conditions Antonetta describes, predate them.

As the book starts, it is reminiscent of "A Civil Action", and reader becomes caught up in the environmental devastation of what was a seemingly benign seaside vacation retreat. However, the work deftly becomes more of a family memoir, periodically interwoven with descriptions of the environmental devastation of Ocean County New Jersey which, ironically her mother's family refused to recognize, just as they suppressed acknowledging their family's many aberrant behaviors and personalities.

While perhaps a trite comparison, the family reminiscences are reminiscent of the writing of Jamaica Kincaid in terms of the cadence, and occasions of repetition. Perhaps this is no coincidence since Antonetta focuses on the family's Afro-Carribean roots (or perhaps I subconsciously looked for such a similarity).

This is an important, beautifly written, and bittersweet work. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: Sad, poignant, and poetic
Review: While "Body Toxic" is an environmental memoir, it is debatable whether the accent should be placed on the term environmental, or on the term toxic. In all probability it should be toxic, because that term is more apropos to the disfunctional maternal side of the family whose emotional problems, while apparently exacerbated by the environmental conditions Antonetta describes, predate them.

As the book starts, it is reminiscent of "A Civil Action", and reader becomes caught up in the environmental devastation of what was a seemingly benign seaside vacation retreat. However, the work deftly becomes more of a family memoir, periodically interwoven with descriptions of the environmental devastation of Ocean County New Jersey which, ironically her mother's family refused to recognize, just as they suppressed acknowledging their family's many aberrant behaviors and personalities.

While perhaps a trite comparison, the family reminiscences are reminiscent of the writing of Jamaica Kincaid in terms of the cadence, and occasions of repetition. Perhaps this is no coincidence since Antonetta focuses on the family's Afro-Carribean roots (or perhaps I subconsciously looked for such a similarity).

This is an important, beautifly written, and bittersweet work. I highly recommend it.

Rating:
Summary: What happened to John McPhee's Pine Barrens?
Review: While I was reading "Body Toxic", I had a nagging recollection of another book and finally remembered John McPhee's book, "Pine Barrens" which was written in the 60's. Read side by side, there would be a great difference in the two accounts of a now ravaged area.

I am not a reader of poetry and maybe that is why I found the prose of this book somewhat difficult to follow. I didn't like the flow of words. The words themselves however were another matter.

"People fought with violence: airplanes,sprays, chemicals. They recruited with zeal. One of the recruitments was the Baby Boom, which my brother and my cousins and I belonged to, the plume of babies that followed the soldiers back from the second world war as if we'd been flushed from their wounds. American men had gone ouerseas and lost limbs and seem themselves die and come back filled with a desire to make new humans. For each of us boom children a soldier lay dead on a battlefield on another continent, and we corrected with our fat and harmless flesh what had been done to their bodies. We are all substitutions."

I finished this book wondering about Susanne Antonetta's health now. I am worried about her and about all of us.

Rating:
Summary: What happened to John McPhee's Pine Barrens?
Review: While I was reading "Body Toxic", I had a nagging recollection of another book and finally remembered John McPhee's book, "Pine Barrens" which was written in the 60's. Read side by side, there would be a great difference in the two accounts of a now ravaged area.

I am not a reader of poetry and maybe that is why I found the prose of this book somewhat difficult to follow. I didn't like the flow of words. The words themselves however were another matter.

"People fought with violence: airplanes,sprays, chemicals. They recruited with zeal. One of the recruitments was the Baby Boom, which my brother and my cousins and I belonged to, the plume of babies that followed the soldiers back from the second world war as if we'd been flushed from their wounds. American men had gone ouerseas and lost limbs and seem themselves die and come back filled with a desire to make new humans. For each of us boom children a soldier lay dead on a battlefield on another continent, and we corrected with our fat and harmless flesh what had been done to their bodies. We are all substitutions."

I finished this book wondering about Susanne Antonetta's health now. I am worried about her and about all of us.

Rating:
Summary: truthful, accurate, moving
Review: 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.