What appears initially as a folly with a look-at-this cover and title becomes, thanks to Radke’s intelligence and curiosity, something much meatier, entertaining and wise. Like many recent book introductions, it’s a lot of tell, not show, and reads like a tacked-on exercise that dilutes the book’s intention and intelligence. The book’s introduction is weak and gratuitous, littered with quotes from unnamed women that feel forced.
There are no upcoming non-fiction books by Heather at this time. She’s smart about social history but falters when she gets personal, indulging feelings about her own rear and dating history that add little beyond dulling her feminist and modern take. Heather Radke has written one non-fiction book, called Butts: A Backstory and was released in 2022. Radke proves a witty, incisive observer, particularly when she steers clear of academic jargon. Radke is an eager, inventive reporter, relishing her search into greater understanding of why so many women, starting with herself, have such complicated relationships with their rears. Her interest lies in glutei maximi that tend toward maximal. Though curious and wide-ranging in her investigation, Radke chose to leave some behinds behind. Throughout, Radke sharply challenges white women to examine how “women’s butts have been used as a means to create and reinforce racial hierarchies,” describing Miley Cyrus’s twerking “as an almost cartoonish example of cultural appropriation.” Marked by Radke’s vivacious writing, candid self-reflections, and sophisticated cultural analyses, this is an essential study of “ideas and prejudices” about the female body. Radke also explores the physiology of running and various biological explanations for why humans developed butts, and interweaves recollections on her own early struggles to accept her “generous butt” with details about historical shifts in preferred posterior proportions. Radiolab reporter Radke delves into the eugenicist underpinnings of Sarah Baartman’s performances as the “Hottentot Venus” in 19th-century London, the giant faux posteriors of Victorian bustles, Jane Fonda’s butt-centered aerobics in the 1970s, the “lineage of butts in mainstream hip-hop,” and the concurrent rise of fashion’s flat “Kate Moss” butt and the Brazilian butt lift in the 1990s, among other milestones in cultural attitudes toward women’s rear ends. This whip-smart history charts the changing symbolism and meanings associated with the female bottom in “mainstream, hegemonic, Western culture” over the past two centuries.
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