"Show me your teeth," the great naturalist George Cuvier is credited with saying, "and I will tell you who you are." In this shattering new work, veteran health journalist Mary Otto looks inside America’s mouth, revealing unsettling truths about our unequal society.
Teeth takes readers on disturbing journey into the role teeth play in our health and our social mobility. Otto’s subjects include the pioneering dentist who made Shirley Temple and Judy Garland’s teeth sparkle on the silver screen; an up-and-coming beauty queen awarded thousands of dollars of free cosmetic dental care; Deamonte Driver, a young Baltimore boy whose death from an abscessed tooth sparked Congressional hearings; a marketing guru who offers advice to dentists on how to push new and expensive treatments and how to keep Medicaid patients at bay; and a huge range of experts, from paleoanthropologists to public health specialists, who untangle the complex history of oral health and dental care.
Muckraking and paradigm-shifting, Teeth exposes for the first time the extent and meaning of our oral health crisis. In the tradition of Mark Kurlansky, it joins the small shelf of books that change the way we view society and ourselves—and will spark an urgent conversation about why our teeth matter.
