Synopses & Reviews
As an ecologist, Sandra Steingraber spent her professional life observing how living things interact with their environments. Now, 38 and pregnant, she had become a habitat-for a population of one.
Having Faith is Steingraber's exploration of the intimate ecology of motherhood. Using her scientist's eye to study the biological drama of new life being knit from the molecules of air, food, and water flowing into her body, she looks at the environmental hazards that now threaten pregnant and breastfeeding women, and examines the effects these toxins can have on a child. Having Faith makes the metamorphosis of a few cells into a baby astonishingly vivid, and the dangers to human reproduction urgently real.
About the Author
Sandra Steingraber, PH.D. is the author of Living Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment and Post-Diagnosis, a volume of poetry. She received her doctorate in biological sciences from the University of Michigan and taught biology for several years at Columbia College, Chicago. The recipient of several awards for science writing, Steingraber was named a Ms. Magazine "Woman of the Year" in 1997. Recently, as part of international treaty negotiations, she breifed United Nations delegates in Geneva on breast milk contamination. She has been selected as the 2001 recipient of the Rachel Carson Leadership Award from Carson's alma mater, Chatham College. Currently on the faculty at Cornell University, she lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband the sculptor Jeff de Castro, and their daugher Faith.