Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been passionate about animals, the environment, and social justice since I was a child. As an adult I have been frustrated—even enragedthat so many products and practices are considered safe and “normal” even though they harm wildlife, pets, and people. I think it's bizarre that people imagine themselves as separate from the chemicals they spray in their homes and their yards, even as they breathe in the toxins. I hope that the concept of “transcorporeality,” which urges us to see our own bodies as literally part of the environment, will convince people that environmentalism isn’t optional but is a vital part of human health and social justice.


I wrote

Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

By Stacy Alaimo,

Book cover of Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

What is my book about?

What does it mean to understand your own body as “nature,” that is, as physically interconnected with the material world?…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of The Cancer Journals

Stacy Alaimo Why did I love this book?

Like everything Audre Lorde wrote, this slim book is powerful and revolutionary. Lorde refuses to see her breast cancer as just a personal problem, and instead, as a Black lesbian feminist, traces its origins to larger economic, industrial, and political forces, including food additives and air pollution. Her activist research is impressive, but it is her fierce, bold critiques that I find most inspiring. She calls out the medical establishment, “We live in a profit economy and there is no profit in the prevention of cancer; there is only profit in the treatment of cancer.” She condemns psychological “causes” of cancer, “It is easier to demand happiness than clean up the environment.” Lorde calls us to understand ourselves within a matrix of social and environmental forces and to make change.

By Audre Lorde,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked The Cancer Journals as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy.

A Penguin Classic

First published over forty years ago, The Cancer Journals is a startling, powerful account of Audre Lorde's experience with breast cancer and mastectomy. Long before narratives explored the silences around illness and women's pain, Lorde questioned the rules of conformity for women's body images and supported the need to confront physical loss not hidden by prosthesis. Living as a "black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet," Lorde heals and re-envisions herself…


Book cover of Body Toxic

Stacy Alaimo Why did I love this book?

Suzanne Antonetta’s Body Toxic epitomizes what I call the “material memoir,” a mode of writing autobiography that seeks to understand the self through connections to places and substances. Antonetta bravely examines her own physical and mental health, grappling with scientific data: “I choked facts and they choked me back, they stuck like Legos—clingy but hard to build into anything real.” Recalling the nuclear warhead that caught fire nearby her childhood home, spraying radioactive particles, she notes that her entire family, bizarrely, has somehow forgotten this incident. Body Toxic is fascinating, chilling, and unnerving, but also beautifully written in unflinching yet poetic prose. Body Toxic convinced me that our life stories are incomplete if they ignore how places and substances have affected us.

By Susanne Antonetta,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Body Toxic as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

A thought-provoking and dramatic account two families who hope to start a new life in the boglands of New Jersey only to discover, much too late, that their new living environment was riddled with radiation and toxic waste.

Two immigrant families drawn together from wildly different parts of the world, Italy on one side and Barbados on the other, pursued their vision of the American dream by building a summer escape in the boglands of New Jersey, where the rural and industrial collide. They picked gooseberries on hot afternoons and spent lazy days rowing dinghies down creeks. But the gooseberry…


Book cover of Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know And Don't Know About Cancer

Stacy Alaimo Why did I love this book?

The title says it all: How Politics Shapes What We Know and Don’t Know About Cancer! This massive study demonstrates how political and economic forces have restricted, diminished, and warped our understanding of the causes of cancer. Not a conspiracy theory, this meticulously researched study carefully demonstrates how science is shaped by economic forces in ways that leave us without the information we need to lead healthier lives. This is no accident, since, as Proctor explains, ignorance doesn’t just happen, it is constructed: “Controversy can be engineered, ignorance and uncertainty can be manufactured, maintained, and disseminated.” In our rapidly transforming world, we need approaches to science that neither dismiss it nor assume that it is capturing everything it should, since it is shaped by politics and economics.

By Robert N. Proctor,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Cancer Wars as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This brilliantly argued and researched book tells the story of how government regulatory agencies, scientists, trade associations, and environmentalists, have managed to obscure the issues and prevent concerted action. Explains why we still dont have straight answers to questions such as: Why do rates from some cancers appear to have risen and others fallen? and suggests how we might actually win the war on cancer.


Book cover of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

Stacy Alaimo Why did I love this book?

After diving into environmental justice, environmental health, cancer, and toxins, readers may desire more positive, healing, and affirmative modes of interconnecting with the natural world. Robin Wall Kimmerer, who recently won the McArthur genius grant, offers a beautiful gift in this multilayered, wonderfully readable work. She generously gives us “a braid of stories meant to heal our relationship with the world.” The book is woven from three strands, “indigenous ways of knowing, scientific knowledge, and the story of an Anishinabekwe scientist trying to bring them together in service of what matters most.” When I taught this book in a college class, the students were moved, inspired, and transformed. They became more deeply connected with the plants all around us, seeking ways to be in relation, care, and give back. 

By Robin Wall Kimmerer,

Why should I read it?

52 authors picked Braiding Sweetgrass as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Called the work of "a mesmerizing storyteller with deep compassion and memorable prose" (Publishers Weekly) and the book that, "anyone interested in natural history, botany, protecting nature, or Native American culture will love," by Library Journal, Braiding Sweetgrass is poised to be a classic of nature writing. As a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer asks questions of nature with the tools of science. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces indigenous teachings that consider plants and animals to be our oldest teachers. Kimmerer brings these two lenses of knowledge together to take "us on a journey that is…


Book cover of Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals

Stacy Alaimo Why did I love this book?

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a “queer, black feminist love evangelist and a marine mammal apprentice,” has created an exuberant book—impossible to categorize. Undrowned is everything—a dramatic account of marine mammals’ struggles, a meditation, a call for action, a manifesto, a workbook with activities. Referencing the middle passage as a Black feminist, Gumbs considers the enmeshment of breathing, drowning, and undrowning, looking to “marine mammal kindred” as “teachers, mentors, guides.” I was deeply moved by how this book passionately voices love for whales, dolphins, and seals. But this love isn’t sentimental—it is active. The chapters call readers to do things, such as “listen,” asking how can we “listen across species, across extinction, across harm?” I marvel at Gumbs’ fierce, unabashed love for marine mammals. Gumbs inspires me to take more risks for others.

By Alexis Pauline Gumbs,

Why should I read it?

3 authors picked Undrowned as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Undrowned is a book-length meditation for social movements and our whole species based on the subversive and transformative guidance of marine mammals. Our aquatic cousins are queer, fierce, protective of each other, complex, shaped by conflict, and struggling to survive the extractive and militarized conditions our species has imposed on the ocean. Gumbs employs a brilliant mix of poetic sensibility and naturalist observation to show what they might teach us, producing not a specific agenda but an unfolding space for wondering and questioning. From the relationship between the endangered North Atlantic Right Whale and Gumbs’s Shinnecock and enslaved ancestors to…


Explore my book 😀

Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

By Stacy Alaimo,

Book cover of Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self

What is my book about?

What does it mean to understand your own body as “nature,” that is, as physically interconnected with the material world? How does understanding ourselves as part of the environment transform ethics, politics, and daily practices? Focusing on feminist, environmentalist, and new materialist theory as well as environmental health and environmental justice movements, this book analyzes a broad range of memoirs, activism, film, art, and philosophy in order to propose the concept of trans-corporeality, which calls us to think of ourselves as the very stuff of the wider world. While Western culture has divided body and mind, nature and culture, science and daily life, this book calls each of us to understand environmental issues in new paradigms in which human beings are intermeshed with the world.

Book cover of The Cancer Journals
Book cover of Body Toxic
Book cover of Cancer Wars: How Politics Shapes What We Know And Don't Know About Cancer

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Elephant Safari

By Peter Riva,

Book cover of Elephant Safari

Peter Riva Author Of Kidnapped on Safari

New book alert!

Why am I passionate about this?

I have been to, and loved, North, Central, and especially East Africa for over fifty years. Only six times have I been to Africa on holiday; more often, perhaps twenty or more times, as a television producer. Working in Africa gains a perspective of reality that the glories of vacation do not. Each has its place, each its pitfalls like stalled plane rides with emergency landings in the bush or attacks by wildlife. But, in the end, the magic of the “otherness,” what an old friend called “primitava” captures one’s soul and changes your life.

Peter's book list on the otherness that few get to experience

What is my book about?

Keen to rekindle their love of East African wildlife adventures after years of filming, extreme dangers, and rescues, producer Pero Baltazar, safari guide Mbuno Waliangulu, and Nancy Breiton, camerawoman, undertake a filming walking adventure north of Lake Rudolf, crossing from Kenya into Ethiopia along the Omo River, following a herd of elephant making their annual migration.

Stumbling onto an elephant poaching, the team become embroiled in true financing of terrorism for al Shabaab –ivory sales–and are determined to stop the slaughter at any cost. Ivory trade financing terrorism involves UN refugee camps with two hundred thousand displaced Somali persons, powerful…

Elephant Safari

By Peter Riva,

What is this book about?

A documentary team hiking through East Africa collides with a gang of deadly poachers, in this gripping adventure by the author of Kidnapped on Safari.

Years of filming, extreme dangers, and daring rescues have taken their toll on documentary producer Pero Baltazar and his team. To relax and reconnect with the East African wildlife they love, Pero organizes a walking safari for him, his camerawoman Nancy Breiton, and their elite guide Mbuno Waliangulu. Still, Pero has trouble truly disconnecting from work. When the team comes across a herd of elephants making their annual migration north of Lake Rudolf, Pero decides…


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Cancer 125 books
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