Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment (Second Edition)

By Sandra Steingraber
Da Capo

In the original 1997 edition of Living Downstream, Sandra Steingraber was the first to compare data on toxic releases with data from U.S. cancer registries. In the last ten years since this edition was published, there has been rapid growth in the understanding of environmental links to human cancer and new published findings that corroborate the evidence Steingraber compiled in 1997. With a Ph.D. in biology and a Master's degree in creative writing, Steingraber has been the recipient of many awards, including Chatham College's Rachel Carson Leadership Award in 2001 and a Hero Award from the Breast Cancer Fund in 2006. Living Downstream is both a personal story of Steingraber's battle with cancer and her investigation into the potential sources of carcinogens released into the air, land, and water in and around her hometown of Normandale in West-Central Illinois, as well as in other areas of the United States.

Thirty years ago, when Steingraber was a 20-year-old college student, she learned that she had bladder cancer and was surprised when her urologist asked her whether she had ever been exposed to textile dyes or worked in a tire factory or the aluminum industry. The author later learned that bladder cancer was considered a quintessential environmental cancer. In other words, there was more evidence linking it to toxic chemical exposure than to any other type of cancer. However, although bladder carcinogens had been identified, they continue to be used by industry even today. The obvious question, of course, is why have these chemicals not been banned. The reader quickly discovers that cancer causation is complex, as is proving the source responsible for this disease.

The author reminds her readers that of the 80,000 synthetic chemicals currently in use in the U.S., only about two percent have been tested for carcinogenicity and only five have been banned under the U.S. Toxics Substances Control Act since 1976. We also learn that the U.S. environmental regulatory system does not require exhaustive toxicological testing of chemicals before they are marketed. Legal limits are set on chemical releases, but, as we recently learned with bisphenol A (BPA), trace amounts can be more harmful to humans than higher doses. Moreover, we are often exposed to many contaminants simultaneously in the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we ingest, and the land where we live and work.

Often compared with Rachel Carson, Steingraber makes some compelling arguments in favor of the precautionary principle, or the better-safe-than-sorry approach to chemicals. She also advocates the principle of reverse onus, which holds producers responsible for proving that their products will not harm the public, as is the case for pharmaceutical companies.

Sandra Steingraber has the expertise in science to give her the necessary authority to present an investigation of this scope and the impeccable writing to make it accessible to a wide audience. Although some environmental texts can be dry, Steingraber's writing and personal story make for a compelling read. Her drive and commitment to finding the missing pieces of the cancer jigsaw puzzle are humbling. I only wish that she had included a map of Tazewell County, Illinois, which we repeatedly visit throughout the book. A few diagrams of some the atoms she describes would have also been nice.

In short, if you have ever thought that the environment may have played a role in the death of a loved one and would like to know more, this is the book for you.

Review by Heather Leighton

I Just Lately Started Buying Wings: Missives From The Other Side of Silence

By Kim Dana Kupperman
Graywolf Press

I Just Lately Started Buying Wings is a collection of memories and letters, speaking out from places of silence. Throughout the text, Kim Dana Kupperman conveys an enduring need to bring chosen tragedies to light and does so vigorously. She talks about her past in a cautious and gentle style, like cleaning a raw wound with salt water: painful yet cleansing.

The book unravels stories about difficult moments in life, describing the deaths of her mother and father, the after effects of radiation pollution in Chernobyl, and failed intimacy in her romantic relationships. She explores the many inner emotions that come along with these trying stages in life, and exposes her past bravely. One of her stories describes her trips to Russia and Ukraine, a private quest to learn more about her family's history. She constantly uses her imagination to investigate her ancestors, like fantasizing her grandmother walking the streets of Kiev. She is constantly searching for a connection between her identity and kin, but instead, she finds herself detached and is “reminded that the business of returning to a place that doesn't belong to me is impossible.”

This intimately detailed storytelling releases sweet sorrow that is rich and poetic. Each chapter is full of vivid imagery that fully traverses all the senses. She inspects small details in her memories: the smell of her lover's breath, or the texture of her mother's feet. The reader is brought daringly close to these personal realities. However, within the numerous events and settings, there is a pervading disconnectedness that distracts from the powerful writing. The loose themes of ancestry and “failed flight” ineffectively tie all these tales together.

Apart from the dispersed themes, Kupperman's “missives” are pungent; full of pain, resentment, and bitter love.

Review by Cinthia Pacheco

Brainscan #24 and #25

By Alex Wrekk

Putting one’s life on display is, in essence, quite a courageous act. Yet in this time of reality television, it is becoming more of a norm, infused with a sense of banality. Thank goodness for zines, where our need to know intimate details of strangers’ lives is a collaboration of intelligence between people who actually think about stuff, write with a purpose, and use their experiences to connect, grow, and reach out to their community.

Brainscan is an extremely personal zine. Its author, Alex Wrekk, is a zine superstar, and rightly so. Author of the popular how-to guide of zine-making, Stolen Sharpie Revolution, over fifteen years of zine-making under her belt, and the most intimate details of her life photocopied, stapled, and mailed around the world, this is a woman committed to taking her experiences in life and putting them on display in a way that is not for ratings or profit. Rather, she does it for the love of writing, creating, and sharing.

The most recent issues of Brainscan, #24 and #25, (which come as a set when ordered from Alex’s site Small World Buttons) are quite different from each other yet enjoyable in their own ways.

Brainscan #24 is a small collection of vignettes containing snippets from Wrekk’s life, such as her love for good beer and why her zine is called Brainscan. They are musings that give a good overview of Wrekk’s thoughts and attitudes without delving very deeply into any particular subject, making it a quick read and a nice sneak peak into someone else’s brain.

Brainscan #25, on the other hand, is much weightier, and concentrates on the story of Wrekk finding her way back to her true love, Paul, after being in an abusive marriage and growing exponentially as a person. Issue #21 of Brainscan is widely known throughout the zine community as it detailed the breakup of Wrekk’s marriage and is celebrated as a courageous story of overcoming abuse. This current issue touches on some of those subjects but is more of a celebration of finding the strength to love and being true to your heart.

The zine sometimes gets a bit painfully intimate to read, bordering on too much information, but it leaves you breathless with its honesty. It is constructed nicely, both visually and thematically, with flashbacks of Wrekk’s early relationship with Paul interspersed through a chronological telling of the dissolution of her marriage, and journey through learning to love herself and other people in new and radical ways.

Grammar and spell-check go out the window, on par with the zine making genre which rebels in both content and construction to mainstream publishing norms. Reading Brainscan is like you have gone into Wrekk’s house, sat on her bed, and read her diary, but she invites this intimacy, keeping no secrets. This style of writing is extremely feminist as it takes subjects women are told to keep hidden and be ashamed of and puts them out into the world, with a sense of acknowledgment and pride in personal growth, and the sharing of stories, in turn facilitating community dialogue.

Review by Jyoti Roy

Taking Women in New Directions: Stories from the Second Wave of the Women's Movement

By Paula Kassell
Hudson House

Paula Kassell's Taking Women in New Directions is not what it sounds like. Rather than being stories about the women's movement in the '70s and '80s, it is primarily a collection of articles that Kassell wrote for the feminist newspaper, New Directions for Women (which she also co-founded and ran out of her own home for seven years). The newspaper was published from 1972-1993, and at its peak had a circulation of 65,000.

The articles themselves are in the form of newspaper clippings, one every page or two (for a total of sixty), and are accompanied by family and personal photos, all of which makes the ninety-seven-page book seem more like a scrapbook than a text. Other than the clippings and photos, there is an eight-page history of the newspaper, also written by Kassell; a couple of pieces about Kassell written by others, Kassell's feminist curriculum vita; and some correspondence between Kassell and an editor. The result is an odd mix of self-promotion and social history.

This doesn't mean that the book is without value. It functions well as a primary source of second wave feminist writing. Kassell always documented her sources and was careful to provide detailed information about the books and organizations she referred to. The articles, editorials, book reviews, and columns, which are presented chronologically, cover a wide range of feminist issues, from equal pay to reproductive rights. One thing that was interesting about reading the book was seeing how many of the issues Kassell wrote about are still not resolved today.

The publisher, Hudson House is a “vanity” press. I give Kassell credit for putting forth the effort to compile the contents, have the book published, and undertake book signings at the age of ninety-one. (The book was published in 2008.) The impression I got is that Kassell wanted to leave behind a testimonial to her work in the feminist movement, primarily, but not solely, in terms of her contributions to New Directions for Women. For example, one of the her accomplishments was to help persuade the New York Times to begin using the honorific “Ms.” (It was one of the last major newspapers to do so.) And she is justifiably proud of all the organizations she joined or helped to found over the years.

The strength of this book is that it shows how the personal life of one woman can contribute to the impact of an entire movement. It is a good answer to those who say that the feminist movement is no longer necessary because all of its goals have been met. And yet the things that have changed have been through the efforts of women like Paula Kassell.

Review by Ellen Keim

Was That Supposed To Be Funny?

By Lauren Barnett

One can never truly pinpoint what feminism looks like. Sometimes it’s the faces of celebrities, proudly claiming the F-word; sometimes it’s a swarm of protesters gathering on the National Mall. And sometimes it’s a crown of broccoli asserting its dancing ability to a bullying stalk of asparagus. In her latest work, Was That Supposed to be Funny, Brooklyn-based cartoonist/blogger Lauren Barnett uses personal anecdotes as well as personified vegetables to invite the reader into her quirky, droll mind.

While the comic does not serve as the site for feminist criticism, Barnett’s presentation of her own experiences as a woman offers fertile ground for exploring the cultural constructs that pervade the female experience. The title alone, inspired by a sixth grade note between the author and a classmate, conjures memories of bra-snapping boys, sexist teachers, landlords, and doctors plus a lifetime of pop-culture references in which the joke is on us. While hunting for an apartment, she is nearly scammed out of her $500 deposit, and completely scammed out of the apartment. One is left to wonder, would the apartment have been secured if the boyfriend with whom she will share it had been the one handling the shady broker?

The most poignant—and strangely hilarious—moments are Barnett’s inclusion of actual diary entries from her adolescence, written verbatim, and brought to life in black and white illustration. Watching Jaws, a nine-year-old Barnett is saddened by the death of “the pretty girl” and later makes history as President of the United States Niki Taylor, supported by her secretary, and best friend, Cindy Crawford. Barnett’s work is a charming and unique representation of the third wave of feminism and a generation of women no longer succumbing to silence. In a country where women are still underpaid and outnumbered by men in a number of fields including publishing, animation, and comedy, Barnett bravely inserts her voice into the dialogue. The result is a sublimely feminist, refreshingly entertaining, and utterly relevant documentation of one woman’s world.

Review by Alicia Sowisdral

Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style

By Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Syracuse University Press

A poet’s power lies not only in her well-crafted images but in the rhythm of her recitation. As I read Lahore With Love, the memoir of Fawzia Afzal-Khan, I longed to hear her read the volume aloud. Many parts of her story poured out in a stream of consciousness, and her anecdotes deftly wove between youth and adulthood, lighthearted desires and the pain of loss, politics and the laughter of girlfriends.

Afzal-Khan interweaves her personal story with key elements in the history of the establishment of Pakistan, her homeland, which was formed just ten years before her birth. The painful string of military dictatorships running her country creates a mirror for the tragic experiences endured by her girlfriends. As she writes, with foreboding, “I have sensed disaster coming their way, my way, my country’s way.” In some ways, Afzal-Khan escaped disaster: she is a professor in the English Department at Montclair State University (New Jersey), a scholar of postcolonial studies, a poet, and an actress. Yet while she lives a successful life in the United States, she carries with her a complicated sorrow and relief, a pain of loss that is aggravated each time she visits Pakistan and sees some new wounds inflicted upon her home and her loved ones.

Lahore With Love gives us vignettes of upper middle class life in a culture where propriety called for gender-segregated social gatherings, but someone was always ready to break rules. The line between acceptable “colonial” habits (Catholic school) and the dangerous “Western decadence” (art school) was at times thin and slippery. As the author forges her own self-identity, the nation also seeks a shape; she heads to the U.S. to obtain her PhD, and Pakistan begins to undergo Islamization, with new layers of reactionary rules added to the old. There is nothing dry about the presentation of material; in one bloody chapter, the story of Shia martyrs is juxtaposed with bullfighting in Spain.

At times I would have enjoyed seeing the vignettes fleshed out more fully, and I suspect some readers will want a volume of Pakistani history by their side to read further about incidents to which the author refers. However, any changes to the unique narrative structure would detract from the author’s intense style. Her voice is the one we use when we long for a reunion with dear friends who are now gone, or hunger to return to the past to stop tragedy from striking, or barely restrain our anger at the callousness of our fellow humans.

Afzal-Khan asks, “Are we doomed to inhabit this binary universe or can we challenge the system that turns us into the roles we wear like selves?” She sets for the reader a powerful mold-breaking example when she self-identifies as “actorsingerpoetactivistmemoirist.”

Review by Lisa Rand

I Have a Song for You

By Bucket Siler

I am so excited to be reviewing a zine this month! My love of little magazines and homegrown self-publishing began as soon as my level of dexterity allowed for scissors, paste, and a stapler to be wielded with semi-precision. This love of writing, crafting, and publishing blossomed into a passionate obsession during my first year of college, when I edited the school literary journal and stayed up all night making chapbooks. So it was with especial glee that I received Bucket Siler’s second zine, I Have a Song for You.

This collection of six stories, three letters, and one piece of “miscellany” is beautifully made with delicate thread binding that should be handled with care. Each cover is Gocco handprinted (Gocco is a home screen printing device) and bears a sweet, cheerful, hand-painted balloon in one of varying primary colors. Other whimsical, comic-style object illustrations are sprinkled throughout the zine (in black and white) and made me think of the comfort that can be found in ordinary things, like public school-style chairs, a pair of dice, cup of black coffee, or a swing set.

Known to be the first page many browsers flip to when deciding whether or not to purchase a magazine, the final page is one usually dedicated to bold and compelling content. In this case, the final page of I Have a Song for You is the single item of “miscellany”: a collage of quotes that are funny, imaginative, sad, and kind of crazy. It’s the perfect window into the flavor of this zine and Bucket Siler’s writing.

The opening story, “The Sun Shines Forever,” has a teacher who risks her job to connect with a troubled student because it seems the teacher may need that connection to the limitless possibilities youth can dream. In a story about a marshmallow creature who becomes the “secret friend” of the protagonist, the marshmallow could be a metaphor for a tender, lonely heart, or it could be that the character is crazy, or maybe little marshmallow creatures really might come in and out your window someday, when you need them most.

Of her own stories Bucket says her “one-shot zines” are a mix of “some nonfiction, some fiction, some magicalness.” Until reading this description of her work I couldn’t quite put my finger on the quality Bucket calls “magicalness,” but yes that’s it! While there are strong threads of loneliness and confusion throughout the collection, I also picked up on a voice that held hopefulness and youth. Bucket Siler has songs for the lonely, the lost, those most in need of something to believe in.

Review by Matsya Siosal