Heather Radke – Cannonball Read 17

“Our bodies, by their very nature, resist control, a fact that always has felt paradoxically triumphant when I encounter it.”

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

January 23, 2024 by Pooja Leave a Comment

Everyone has a butt, and most everyone accords them more thought and meaning than they do many other parts of their body. But why do we pay them so much attention? How have they come to be so fraught with connotation? I remember seeing this book on NetGalley ages back, but forgot that I wanted to read it until I read Travis_J_Smith’s review last week. This proves I have a terrible memory, because who could forget that cover? I’ve been feeling like reading a micro-history […]

Not where I saw that going at all

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

January 17, 2024 by Travis_J_Smith 1 Comment

Butts isn’t what I expected, but (pun unintended) I don’t know what I expected, to be quite honest. I remember wondering how anybody could sustain talk about butts for the length of a full book, which is why I had avoided buying/reading this one, in spite of the hype. When it came time for my birthday, though, and I had the opportunity to do the book store challenge, where you get a set amount of time to run rampant in a book store and the other person […]

A book about butts!

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

February 8, 2023 by narfna Leave a Comment

This was a fun book, just as the cover and (extremely good) title promised. Butts: A Backstory is a cultural microhistory of the butt that pretty much covers every aspect of it that you would want or expect it to. We start with the evolutionary purpose of the butt and then move on to such topics as: Sarah Baartman (“The Hottentot Venus”, and why everything about what happened to her and even that moniker is super racist and tragic); the impact of butts on fashion […]

“There’s no uniformity in the panoply of butts.”

Butts: A Backstory by Heather Radke

February 7, 2023 by Halbs Leave a Comment

I have to say that given the cover of this book, and the title, I was expecting the book to be more…tongue in cheek? But this book isn’t that. Rather than being a fun “backstory” of our fascination with butts, it’s a pretty straightforward gender and race studies critique of Western pop culture’s fascination with butts. The misdirection is certainly the fault of the publisher, as the author is very clear on the book’s intentions from the Introduction on. With that bit of business behind […]

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