Full Body Burden

byKristen Iversen, Kirsten Potter (Read by)

Growing Up in the Shadow of a Secret Nuclear Facility

It is the early 1950s. Kristen Iversen is enjoying a carefree childhood surrounded by desert and mountains. But just a few miles down the road, the US government decides to build a secret nuclear weapons facility at Rocky Flats.

Kirsten and her siblings jump streams, ride horses, live a happy outdoors life. But beneath this veneer her family is quietly falling apart. Her father drinks, her mother copes.

And in a series of fires, accidents and other catastrophic leaks, Rocky Flats nuclear plant is spewing an invisible cocktail of the most dangerous substances on earth into this pristine landscape. The ground, the air and the water are all alive with radiation.

The years that follow will bring protests, investigations, denials, cover-ups, threats and lies. And then, one after another, people start to fall ill.

A shocking and salutary coming-of-age memoir, Kristen Iversen has produced a meticulously researched and compelling narrative of growing up in the “sacrifice zone” of America’s nuclear weapons programme… Full Body Burden is one of those rare, life-changing works whose quiet, insistent moral authority commands us to read on and to remember

Melanie McGrath, Sunday Telegraph

About Kristen Iversen

Details
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • ISBN: 9781473512634
  • Length: 833 minutes
  • Price: £12.00
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