Pink ribbon blues : how breast cancer culture undermines women's health /

Medical sociologist Sulik (women's studies, Univ. at Albany (SUNY)) takes an uncommonly critical approach to the modern breast cancer movement. Using insights drawn from interviews, autobiographical sources, and published statistics, she describes the rise of a distinct "pink ribbon" culture in the past two decades. This culture, she argues, maintains a strict set of norms governing the behavior, attitudes, and acceptable emotions of those diagnosed with breast cancer, as well as of the larger society. Supported and marketed by the medical and pharmaceutical industries and powerful foundations such as Susan G. Komen for the Cure, the pink ribbon culture has focused attention and resources toward breast cancer awareness, early detection, and treatment modalities while downplaying a search for the causes of breast cancer, particularly environmental and social causes. Sulik's work is valuable insofar as it raises issues not often heard. Many of her insights are striking and she pulls together a wealth of historical material and data. The book suffers from repetition, tangential rambling, and occasional polemic, flawing an otherwise valuable sociological analysis, but it is worth reading nonetheless. Summing Up: Recommended. University and larger public libraries, all levels. E. L. Maher emerita, Indiana University South Bend

In this eye-opening story about the ubiquitous pink ribbon, medical sociologist Sulik reveals the dark side of the breast cancer awareness movement. She argues that breast cancer has become a brand, complete with its own logo and self-serving corporations. Zeneca, which makes the treatment drug tamoxifen, has, for instance, always put money into the 25-year-old National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Sulik no fan of the October celebration calls it the official platform for pink ribbon culture to advertise treatment, promote early detection, encourage fundraising, and promise eventual eradication. Despite the sea of pink, no cure is in sight and treatment and detection efforts remain flawed. The Institute of Medicine reported that 75 percent of positive mammograms are, upon biopsy, false positives, and that mammograms miss 25 to 40 percent of tumors that actually are cancerous. Americans don't even know how much of the money they spend on pink products goes toward legitimate breast cancer research. In the end, this well-reported book (Sulik interviewed hundreds of sources) will make readers think twice before they shell out extra bucks for a pink mixer.--Springen, Karen Copyright 2010 Booklist

You may never think pink again about breast cancer after reading Sulik's sobering and lucid critique of what she calls "pink culture"-which has turned a "complex social and medical" issue into "a popular item for public consumption" and has actually "impeded progress in the war on breast cancer." Sulik, a medical sociologist, argues that the truth about breast cancer, so memorably voiced by its victims in the early 1990s, has now been "silenced in a cacophony of pink talk" about triumph and transcendence thanks to advertising, the media, and the medical establishment. And, Sulik says, pink products and symbols only reinforce traditional notions of femininity and sexuality. Equally troubling is the questionable impact of mammography, which, though urged upon women, has scarcely affected death rates-40,000 women (and 450 men) die of breast cancer each year. With breast cancer incidence rates rising, Sulik's call to "take a road less pink" demands to be heard. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Now in paperback, a sociology professor's view of the advocacy movement: more about exploitation than empowerment. (LJ 9/1/10) (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.