Breasts provide the human animal with many vital functions, including nutrition, beauty and sexual pleasure. As one of the major organs that make mammals different from other species, breasts also provide a record of our environmental history. That makes boobs very important to the future viability of mankind. "Breasts are us," Florence Williams writes. "Our breasts soak up pollution like a pair of soft sponges."
The story is personal: while nursing her second child, Williams became incensed by an article about the dangerous levels of flame retardants in breast milk. She enrolled in a University of Texas Public Health Study and discovered a maelstrom of poisons brewing in her orbs.
Williams sets out on a passionate crusade to expose the history of the breast, noting, for example, the connection between the age of a young woman's menarche and the age of her first full-term birth and the subsequent possibility of contracting breast cancer, along with new information about residues in the products we use that linger in the breast milk passed to our children and grandchildren. Disturbingly, much of the science behind what is known of the breast is rooted in what Williams calls S.W.A.G.: "scientific wild-ass guesses. "
Part memoir, part anthropological manifesto--and all fearlessly entertaining medical journalism--Breasts marries deadpan humor with gross anatomy in a romp through human history's most coveted and ogled over body part. "If to have breasts is to be human," writes Williams, "then to save them is to save ourselves." --Nancy Powell, freelance writer