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Title: Living Downstream : A Scientist's Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment by Sandra Steingraber ISBN: 0-375-70099-4 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 28 July, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.62 (13 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Do you eat? Breathe? Have kids?
Comment: Then you need this book.
For me the most shocking thing about Living Downstream is how little known it is, given the life or death issues it addresses. I had never heard of it until I attended a lecture in support of the author's new book, Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood.
What Living Downstream does is explore the connections between the toxic chemicals found everywhere in our environment, and various cancers and other diseases.
Examined are various mediums of transmission: earth, air, water, fire; chemicals from vinyl chloride, to pesticides and insecticides, to PCBs--even dry cleaning fluid (PCE); and scientific evidence of their connections to cancers, immune deficiencies and reproductive problems.
Pulling all this research together is in itself a tremendous service. Science so often involves narrow fields of research with little communication between fields.
Still, though it's hardly a "light read," it is nothing like those dry science textbooks you remember.
The author is also a poet, and she uses metaphor and imagery to explain in easy terms anything unfamiliar to the non-scientist. This makes the book intelligent-user friendly and even, at times, beautiful. The personal narrative keeps it human.
However, I won't lie and say it is a "fun read." The truth is, I found it educational and even life-changing, but also deeply unsettling and even frightening.
No longer can I dismiss cancer as genetic, or easily warded off through diet and lifestyle, or see environmental cancers as the problem of those poor souls unfortunate enough to live near some toxic waste dump.
The book gave me knowledge, and yes, it's true: knowledge IS power. It gave me the motivation to buy organic, to use filtered (NOT bottled) water, to take a very serious look at any chemical I use around my home.
It also helped me understand why this is not the whole answer, that the real answer lies in taking serious steps to address the poisoning of our environment. The first and most important step, however, is awareness, which is why you should read this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: A Modern Rachel Carson
Comment: Living Downstream is the modern version of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. I cannot even begin to emphasize the importance of this book. With the accuracy of a scientist and the pen of a poet, Steingraber speaks truth to power like no other book available on this subject. Indeed, most scientists have been hired to protect polluters. The book will grab you, frighten you and at times make you want to cry -- which is good. This book must not be ignored. Read it, get mad, and get involved. Other related readings that blew me away: "From Naked Ape to Superspecies" by David Suzuki and "Canaries on the Rim" by Chip Ward.
Rating: 5
Summary: Gripping and engrossing
Comment: The author is an articulate ecological biologist who is herself a cancer survivor. My eyes were tempted to gloss over the pages and pages of statistics (they were hard to face up to), but I resisted the urge and instead forced myself to digest the haunting truth standing behind each of the seemingly endless reports and case-studies representing scores of individuals who traversed the cancer ordeal before I did. I thought of the author, poring over her keyboard, obsessed with what seemed to be a morose subject matter, but I became relentlessly engrossed in the gravity of her cause. In her book, she highlights environmental and industrial travesties, and she argues that, as a species, we are vastly contributing to our own high rates of cancer incidence.
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