Radke examines the bustle, which became popular in 1868, a rare historical moment in which women chose to accentuate their posteriors in order to 'create the desired gluteal lump.' During her investigation, she tracks down the creator of the 'Buns of Steel' workout tapes, an oversized figure with a seemingly shaky relationship with the truth. Radke, a reporter for 'Radiolab' and an instructor in Columbia's MFA writing program, is a curious, inventive reporter who is fascinated by why so many women, beginning with herself, have such complicated relationships with their rears. As Sir Mix-a-Lot might say, this book has returned. Her fascination is with glutei maximi which tends to be maximal. Despite being inquisitive and broad in her investigation, Radke chose to leave some evidence behind.

'Butts,' filtered through a feminist lens, is a hybrid memoir and investigation into women's rears - and people with a talent for drag. The cover of Radke's winning, cheeky, and illuminating 'Butts: A Backstory' features a voluptuous peach. Her sources range from anthropological scholarship to Sir Mix-a-'Baby Lot's Got Back,' resulting in a lively mash-up of science and pop culture. Radke covers everything from 19th-century burlesque to the aerobics craze of the 1980s to Kim Kardashian's Internet-breaking backside.

This lively cultural history combines scholarship and pop culture to create a comprehensive taxonomy of the female bottom. Heather Radke, in her book 'Butts: A Backstory,' seeks the answer. But why? Heather Radke, a reporter, essayist, and RadioLab contributor, is determined to find out in Butts: A Backstory. From anxious self-examinations trying on jeans in department store dressing rooms to enduring crass remarks while walking down the street or high school hallways, a woman's buttocks are constantly being assessed, criticized, and objectified. It is a human-only body part that is critical to our evolution and survival, but it has come to represent so much more: sex, desire, comedy, and shame. Humans have a complicated relationship with butts, whether we love or hate them, think they're sexy or strange, think they're too big, too small, or somewhere in between. But how did we get to this point in history where women's posteriors have become a cultural obsession? Many women's origin stories begin with their buttocks, the most symbolic and attention-grabbing of female body parts-always too big, too small, too flat, too flabby, too wrong. 'Everyone's origin story for how they feel about their adult body is different,' writes journalist Heather Radke.

Butts a backstory book