Butts: A Backstory
Part deep dive reportage, part personal journey, part cabinet of curiosities, Butts is an entertaining, illuminating, and thoughtful examination of why certain silhouettes come in and out of fashion—and how larger ideas about race, control, liberation, and power affect our most private feelings about ourselves and others.
Praise for Butts
"Engaging, personal. . . . don't be fooled by the cheeky peach emoji."
—The New York Times Book Review
“This crackling cultural history melds scholarship and pop culture to arrive at a comprehensive taxonomy of the female bottom. … Radke leaves no stone unturned… Lively and thorough, Butts is the best kind of nonfiction—the kind that forces you to see something ordinary through completely new eyes.”
—The Washington Post
“Deeply reported and wildly entertaining… Radke takes readers through an absorbing cultural history that asks how this human body part came to be on the receiving end of so much attention.”
—TIME, 100 Must-Read Books of 2022
“This crackling cultural history melds scholarship and pop culture to arrive at a comprehensive taxonomy of the female bottom. … Radke leaves no stone unturned… Lively and thorough, Butts is the best kind of nonfiction—the kind that forces you to see something ordinary through completely new eyes.”
—Esquire, Best Books of 2022
"Rigorous, generous, and utterly compelling.... With humor, intelligence, outrage, and compassion, Radke excavates the social and historical forces that haunt our most ordinary moments. This fiercely intelligent, frequently witty journey will transform how you think about the butt, and-quite possibly-how you consider the value of exploring those parts of ourselves we don't take seriously enough.
— Leslie Jamison, bestselling author of Make It Scream, Make It Burn and The Recovering
"From the first, I have been delighted and deeply informed by Heather Radke's writing. She has a mind like no other. This book contributes not only a great deal to the complicated discussion around women's bodies; it illuminates what unites us all: being human."
— Hilton Als, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and author of White Girls
"Juicy and scholarly, Butts is a heck of a ride. At turns troubling, wild, painful, surprising, and flat-out fun, Rake's reporting unearths a set of largely overlooked historical figures with outsize effects on cultural evolutions, from the discovery of the first hominid butt, to the creation of the frightening statues Norm and Norma, to the gruesome tale behind the bustle, and rebels – drag queens and fat activists and twerkers – who flip supremacy the bird and offer another path through."
— Lulu Miller, bestselling author of Why Fish Don't Exist
"A deeply thought, rigorously researched, and riveting history of human butts – Radke knows exactly when to approach her subject with levity and when with gravity. A pitch-perfect debut."
— Melissa Febos, bestselling author of Girlhood and Body Work
"Heather Radke takes a subject so familiar as to be practically invisible and trains a sharp reportorial eye on it, touring the reader through the centuries of cultural history that shape our feelings about what's filling out our jeans. Butts is everything you want a piece of reportage to be: smart, creative, searching, deeply researched, political, and fun."