Book Review

Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood
by Sandra Steingraber
Review by Jake Aryeh Marcus

Sandra Steingraber is a scientist and an environmental activist. Prior to her first pregnancy, she wrote, spoke and taught extensively as a biologist and scholar. In this way, her experience seems to be unfamiliar to many of us. Having Faith, however, opens with a hilarious scene of Steingraber hiding in a faculty bathroom at the age of 38, while a lecture hall full of students waits for her, as she stares at her pee on a stick and waits for the lavender lines to appear. She spent that fateful five minutes reviewing in her mind the intricacies of the process of conception while the rest of us may have had our brains consumed with less complex thoughts, but we all stared at the stick and wanted that second lavender line to show up.

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Steingraber is a wonderful writer. She manages to keep the reader as absorbed in the science of pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding, as in pollution's impact on our environment. She does this as we follow the course of her first pregnancy remembering this powerful time in our own lives.

The first three-quarters of Having Faith is divided into the months of the author's pregnancy with each chapter also corresponding to the months of the traditional agricultural cycle. The changes in her body are presented along with an exploration of how the changes to the environment affects animal and plant life during the same time period. Following this path, we learn some fascinating things about human development as well as some very disturbing things about the damage we have done to the earth and how that damage has come back to harm us all. This part of the book is riveting and all the more compelling because Steingraber continues to convey her wonder at her new place in all she has studied. She never loses sight of herself as a woman experiencing the joys and fears of her first pregnancy.

The final quarter of the book is a bit slower but still quite important. In it, Steingraber is back to the work of scientist and chronicles her involvement in international efforts to both curb pollution and to accurately report its tremendous impact.

Having Faith is a perfect combination of elements. The author's unique perspective as a pregnant biologist and her formidable skill as a writer combine to make this a beautifully written expose on the state of environmental pollution and its impact on pregnancy and breastfeeding.

Order Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood Now!

Jake Aryeh Marcus is a lawyer, freelance writer and editor, and work-at-home mom to unschooling sons Luca, Nicky, and Aidan. Jake's writing has appeared in The Compleat Mother, The Family Life Journal, and elsewhere. Jake and her family live in the suburbs of Philadelphia.

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