BUTTS

BUTTS is an unexpected, fascinating journey for fans of Mary Roach and Mark Kurlansky into the scientific and cultural history of the female butt, from fossils and flappers to Buns of Steel and Baby Got Back.

Growing up, Heather Radke always felt that her butt was too big. Sitting in dressing rooms with her mother as they tried on clothes, walking down the street ignoring unwanted cat calls, and ignoring the juvenile comments hurled at her in middle school hallways during the era of rail-thin supermodels, the unruly shape of her rear end made her feel unattractive and out of place. That is, until one day a decade or so later, when she realized that bodies like hers were suddenly everywhere, in music videos and song lyrics, advertisements, and on the cover of celebrity tabloids. The thing she had been raised to be ashamed of was suddenly a kind of superpower: what had happened?

To find out, Radke - now a museum curator and writer - set out on a journey to discover how a random collection of fat and flesh became the most racialized, sexualized, and mythologized part of the female body, shaping how we see ourselves and one another. As she travels from the halls of Harvard and fashion studios of New York to museum archives in Paris and London, she encounters evolutionary biologists who study the way butts help us run, fit models whose measurements have defined jean sizes for decades, the creators of the glute-focused fitness crazes of the 1980s, and explores the impact of Sarah Bartmann, known as "The Venus Hottentot," flappers, drag queens, and twerk.

Part reportage, part personal journey, and part cabinet of curiosities, Butts provides an entertaining and informative, but thoughtfully analytic understanding of how our most private feelings about our own bodies emerge from larger forces, and how and why certain kinds of bodies come in and out of fashion.

Heather Radke is an essayist, journalist, and contributing editor and reporter at Radiolab, the Peabody Award-winning program from WNYC. She has written for publications including The Believer, Longreads, and The Paris Review, and she teaches at Columbia University's Creative Writing MFA Program. Before becoming a writer, Heather worked as a curator at the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum in Chicago.