As she says in her preface, you need to “walk up river” to see why bodies keep floating down. The book is called Living Downstream-downstream, that is, of carcinogens. For another, it admits to the uncertainties, while holding relentlessly to the truth that, one way or another, our environment is responsible in large part for the modern scourge of cancer. For one thing, it is beautifully written: spare, precise and passionate. I picked up Sandra Steingraber’s book, subtitled “An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment”, with some trepidation, because I feared a simple-minded harangue about how chemicals are killing us. Are these cancers linked? Is there a common cause? Is there a cluster, or have I imagined it? With cancer, it is hard know what to blame. More recently, I have noticed that several parents of children at our local school have died from cancer. That road, in fact, claimed my best friend.īut at least we knew what to blame. The 1950s were a bad time for road deaths in Britain, and I saw the evidence at first hand-the main road to the Channel ports ran right past my village. IN MY youth, the big killer was car crashes. Living Downstream by Sandra Steingraber, Virago, £18.99/$24.95, ISBN 1860494692 (June in US)
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