The author's family -- immigrants from Italy on one side and Barbados on the other -- tried to realize the American dream by building a summer escape in the boglands of New Jersey where the rural and industrial collide. They picked gooseberries along the chain-link fence of Oyster Creek Nuclear Power Plant while it released more radiation than Three Mile Island. They rowed dinghies along creeks contaminated with drums of toxic waste -- waste dumped illegally by various chemical companies. One by one, they discovered their own infertility, while throughout the area parents were being asked to donate their children's baby teeth to be tested for traces of radiation.Body Toxic merges the personal and familial with the historical, political, and environmental in a way that creates a new genre: environmental memoir, fusing fact and meditation, the intensely intimate and the starkly political. Brave, harrowing, beautifully written, Antonetta's memoir explores an American family in the midst of thewreckage of the American dream.