Toxic: Women, Fame, and the Tabloid 2000s by Sarah Ditum
Although my teenage years fell right in the middle of the period British journalist Sarah Ditum spotlights in her new book, I spent the decade doggedly ignoring pop culture, because it terrified me. Toxic proves just how valid was my terror-—and how futile my efforts to flee from it. In this incisive and entertaining, yet consistently disturbing, examination of the casual cruelty leveled at female celebrities throughout the early aughts, Ditum argues that the tabloid treatment battered not only the targeted celebrities themselves, but also all women with the misfortune of coming of age in the midst of the feeding frenzy. Each chapter reviews the case of a woman chewed up and spat out by the carnivorous mass-media machine, from Britney Spears to Janet Jackson to Amy Winehouse, and reconsiders the star’s notorious story in the wider sociocultural context of the era. Of particular relevance, Ditum writes, is the rise of the Internet, with its proliferation of the gossip blogs that would turbocharge a seemingly bottomless public appetite for women’s mortification. Reality TV, the 2008 financial crash, social media and their discontents are dissected as well, bearing new insights into the grotesqueries of the not-so-distant past and their lingering influence today.
For fans of critical pop culture studies, celebrity biographies, and Sadie Doyle’s Trainwreck. Also recommended for recovering survivors of a 2000s girlhood (who wants to start a support group?).
The Cancer Factory: Industrial Chemicals, Corporate Deception, and the Hidden Deaths of American Workers by Jim Morris
Jim Morris, journalist and founder of the nonprofit news organization Public Health Watch, reports on a different sort of noxiousness in his investigation of one of the most grievous, and best documented, cases of lethal corporate negligence in U.S. history. Between 1980 and 2022, 78 people associated with the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company chemical factory in Niagara Falls, NY were diagnosed with bladder cancer, the result of a carcinogenic chemical supplied to Goodyear by DuPont. Both companies had been aware of the chemical’s health risks as far back as the 1950s, yet failed to notify workers of the dangers or institute any measures to protect them. In The Cancer Factory, Morris traces the stories of the men and women sickened by chemical exposure at Goodyear and the lawsuit they filed against the company. While his writing on the harms done to individual workers is harrowing and impassioned, Morris’s book is ultimately a critique of corporate callousness, as well as of the limp, lagging regulatory system that enables companies like Goodyear to knowingly poison their workforce for decades. He warns that regulations remain inadequate to protect workers, even as countless new chemicals – the long-term health impacts of which no one knows – are poured into the market each year. An unsparing and poignant feat of muckraking journalism, The Cancer Factory sounds the call for accountability and an end to profits over people.
For rabble-rousers, Upton Sinclair enthusiasts, and fans of Kerri Arsenault’s Mill Town.
