I've found a way to like Barbara Ehrenreich!
09 March 2011
I just needed her in smaller doses!
Enter the investigative book Submersion Journalism: Reporting in the Radical First Person from Harper's Magazine, edited by Bill Wasik. Now, I LOVE investigative writing. I love submersion journalism (although I tend to refer to it as immersion journalism). So I thought this book would be perfect.
Well, yes and no. Most of the pieces were too political for me, and I am quite simply not in the mood right now. But there's still a lot of other good stuff here. The book's split into six sections: Politics, Violence, Illness, Vice, the Arts, and Confessions of War, and includes essays by such writers as Wells Tower, Charles Bowden, William T. Vollmann, and Ehrenreich.
Ehrenreich's piece is on her diagnosis with cancer, and how annoyed she was by all the pink-ribbon boosterism surrounding the disease, which eventually became the basis for her book Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America. Here's my favorite bits from the article:
"But I have never admired the 'natural' or believed in the 'wisdom of the body.' Death is as 'natural' as anything gets, and the body has always seemed to me like a retarded Siamese twin dragging along behind me, an hysteric really, dangerously overreacting, in my case, to everyday allergens and minute ingestions of sugar." (p. 113.)
and:
"Worse, by ignoring or underemphasizing the vexing issue of environmental causes, the breast-cancer cult turns women into dupes of what could be called the Cancer Industrial Complex: the multinational corporate enterprise that with one hand doles out carcinogens and disease and, with the other, offers expensive, semi-toxic pharmaceutical treatments. Breast Cancer Awareness Month, for example, is sponsored by AstraZeneca, which, until a corporate reorginzation in 2000, was a leading producer of pesticides, including acetochlor, classified by the EPA as a 'probable human carcinogen.'" (p. 126.)
I didn't care much for Bright-sided, but this journalistic piece has some bite to it. Evidently I just need my Ehrenreich in article, rather than book, form.