Issue link: https://cp.revolio.com/i/30780
book reviews is of this second kind. Caleb Chee- shahteaumuck was real—a Wôpanâak Indian who graduated from Harvard in 1665. But the book’s narrator is entirely fictional: Bethia Mayfield, daughter of the island’s Calvinist minister, secret childhood friend of Caleb and witness to much of his life. As always, Brooks manages to tell a story both sober and luminous. She makes her point—while relations be- tween European settlers and native tribes ranged from well-meaning to murderous, the outcome was often the same—but she does so gently. Horrific events are acknowledged and alluded to, but rarely shown on the page. Among the novel’s many pleas- ures are its descriptions of the natu- ral landscape. From Caleb, Bethia learns the Wampaontoaonk words— “the true names,” she calls them— for the wild things around her, though when the story moves to Newtowne, Brooks shows how quick- ly a land can be despoiled. A bright young woman, Bethia is also hungry for a world that is denied to her—the world of books. She eavesdrops, first on her brother’s lessons, later on lec- tures at the college where she works in the kitchen. Bethia is not an implausible cre- ation, but she may be too comfortable for the modern reader. It’s so easy to identify with the young girl who, more than 300 years ago, rode her horse heedlessly on the beach, sneaked off for a secret friendship with an Indian boy and was instinc- tively sensitive to the power of the Wôpanâak ceremonies. Even her re- ligion, pervasive and restrictive as it was, doesn’t really separate her from us. Caleb says, “So many things I loved, I have had to learn to hate,” but the internal conflicts resulting from Bethia’s faith are of a lesser, more manageable sort. This unim- peachable narrator makes the book an effortless read but may also slight- 56 | SPRING 2011 ly diminish a primary pleasure of his- torical fiction—the reader’s sense of spending time in someplace very strange. KAREN JOY FOWLER is author of the novels Sarah Canary and The Jane Austen Book Club and the short story collection What I Didn’t See. TOXIC PRICE TAGS Laura Orlando Raising Elijah: Protecting Our Children in an Age of Environmental Crisis By Sandra Steingraber Da Capo Press SANDRA STEINGRABER’S FIRST book, Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment, left reviewers calling her “the new Rachel Carson.” It is an apt comparison. Not since 1962, when Carson coura- geously challenged the chemical industry in Silent Spring, has a scien- tist woven so much revelation and research together with such gorgeous and persuasive prose. In Raising Elijah, Steingraber makes a case for “outspoken, full- throated heroism in the face of the great moral crisis of our day.” She girds readers for the struggle we must take up if we are to wrest our world from the embrace of the suicidals. Steingraber explains that there are actually two crises: climate chaos from the accumulation of heat-trapping gases and the poisoning of our children’s bodies with toxic chemicals. The two share a common root: fossil fuels. She walks us through the terrible statistics on childhood diseases linked to chemical exposures and, to show that children’s health is not an economic “externality,” gives each a price tag: The quantifiable are in billions; oth- ers, like early puberty among girls, and thus shortened childhoods, have no assigned dollar value. When her son, Elijah, was born, Steingraber was living in a rented cabin in rural New York with her hus- band, Jeff, and daughter, Faith, the inspiration for her acclaimed exami- nation of environmental threats to fe- tal development, Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood. She worked from home, gave occasional lectures and considered it her job as mother to keep her children “from situations that seem inherently dan- gerous,” like eating food grown with pesticides. Though choosing organic food is good for the eater and the grower— as well as for rural economies and en- vironments—Steingraber knows that the answers to the enormous prob- lems we face are not to be found in “green” shopping guides and web- sites. “As a matter of principle, toxic- ity should not be a consumer choice,” she writes. “Believing that we can buy safety for our children with money and knowledge leaves those with nei- ther in harm’s way.” We can try to be our own poison-control centers, but it is institutional change and regulatory muscle that will make the difference. Steingraber’s narra- tive is personal and po- litical, funny and smart. She shows us that femi- nism and motherhood are not at odds; com- bined, they make for heroes. Braving the question of whether to tell children about the dangers that lurk in our yards and our atmosphere, she writes, “The way we protect our kids from terrible knowl- edge is not to hide the terrible knowl- www.feminist.org