Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History (Thorndike Press Large Print Nonfiction) - Hardcover

Williams, Florence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1410452115 ISBN 13: 9781410452115

Publisher: Thorndike Press, 2012

Synopsis

Draws from the fields of anthropology, biology, and medicine to describe the life cycle of the human female breast, from puberty to pregnancy to menopause, and discusses the organ's modern susceptibility to toxins and disease.

About this title

About the Author

Florence Williams is a journalist and contributing editor to Outside magazine. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Times Magazine, and National Geographic among others. Her first book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, was a New York Times Notable Book of 2012 and the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science and Technology. Williams lives in Washington, DC.

Review

Florence Williams's double-D talents as a reporter and writer lift this book high above the genre and separate it from the ranks of ordinary science writing. Breasts is illuminating, surprising, clever, important. Williams is an author to savor and look forward to. --Mary Roach

Be brave, buy this book, and withstand the giggles and sniggers of your friends. For here is a wonderful history, stretching across hundreds of millions of years, of an astonishingly complex part of the human body. Williams weaves together research on nutrition, cancer, psychology, and even structural engineering to create a fascinating portrait of the breast: that singular gland that gave us, as mammals, our very name. --Carl Zimmer, author of Parasite Rex and Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea

Akin to Rachel Carson's 1962 classic Silent Spring. --M. G. Lord

In her comprehensive 'environmental history' of the only human body part without its own medical specialty, ...Williams focuses on the importance of understanding breasts as more than sex objects...Williams puts hard data and personal history together with humor, creating an evenhanded cautionary tale that will both amuse and appall.

Exceptional.

Starred Review. ...exceptional history... with smarts, sass, and intent.... Meant to nurture the next generation for life on planet Earth, breasts are also humanity's first responders to environmental changes. And what have modern-day chemical exposures wrought? The answers to this question and many more are found in Williams' remarkably informative and compelling work of discovery.

Williams has done us all--men and women--an enormous favor.

With a scientist's mind, a journalist's eye, and a mother's heart, Williams has produced a wide-ranging environmental history of the breast...Williams delineates one of the most consequential dramas at the intersection of human evolution and environmental change.

Much like [Mary Roach's] Stiff, Breasts benefits from its author's field trips...Seen this way--the breast as a canary in a toxic coal mine--[Williams's] call to protect them feels both timely and urgent.

A smart, wry synthesis of evolution, physiology, microbiology, environmental science, and even biomechanics. --Carl Zimmer"

Edition details

• Publisher: Thorndike Press
• Publication date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1410452115
• ISBN 13: 9781410452115
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 471