Author Description

Thirty-five years after Rachel Carson's Silent Spring warned of the impact of chemicals on the environment, biologist Sandra Steingraber offers a critique of current thinking on cancer and its causes. She asserts that society has wilfully ignored the evidence and is still poisoning the environment. Throughout her study she weaves two stories - of Rachel Carson and her battle to be heard and of her own cancer of the bladder, which she traces back to agricultural and industrial contamination. She argues for the basic connection between our bodies and the ecological world in which we eat, drink, breathe and work.