Butts: A Backstory

"Winning, cheeky, and illuminating....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." —The Washington Post
"Lively and thorough, Butts is the best kind of nonfiction." —Esquire, Best Books of 2022
A "carefully researched and reported work of cultural history" (The New York Times) that explores how one body part has influenced the female—and human—experience for centuries, and what that obsession reveals about our lives today.
Whether we love them or hate them, think they're sexy, think they're strange, consider them too big, too small, or anywhere in between, humans have a complicated relationship with butts. It is a body part unique to humans, critical to our evolution and survival, and yet it has come to signify so much more: sex, desire, comedy, shame. A woman's...