A powerfully researched and important look at the ravages of nuclear waste remediation.
Cram offers a study of the limits and failures of nuclear cleanup and its safety risks.
This latest volume in the University of California Press’ Critical Environments series on nature, science, and politics takes a sweeping look at strategies for the remediation of nuclear harm. It focuses on the Hanford Site in eastern Washington state, where it estimates that 56 million gallons of radioactive waste product are stored in underground tanks, and nine reactors and five chemical processing plants contaminated the soil with about 450 billion gallons of liquid waste. Cram is a professor at the University of Washington Bothell’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Every member of her immediate family was diagnosed with cancer (including the author), and both her parents died of it; her mother grew up in eastern Washington. “It matters that I want to know what caused my family’s cancer. And it matters that I will never be able to fully answer that question,” Cram writes. Working outward from the Hanford site and backward in time to the Castle-Bravo nuclear test in 1954—a detonation whose irradiated ash poisoned the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon—Cram works to find answers to a question posed by Hanford scientist Jack Healy: “How do we strike a proper balance between the interests of the individual and the interests of the Nation?” What does it mean, Cram asks, “to safeguard individual bodies with regulations that only envision disembodied statistical aggregates?” It’s a problem, she notes, that’s worsened by the fact that the disembodied statistics are skewed: She writes that women and children, for instance, are far more likely to develop radiation-caused cancers than the adult male “Reference Man” in industry use. In prose that’s both calm and solidly grounded in cited research, Cram presents a flatly devastating book about egregious mismanagement at the Hanford site and, more broadly, about the United States government’s calculation of risk in the field of nuclear waste disposal—a problem that, as Cram rightly points out, will certainly outlast the government itself. The result is a quietly devastating indictment that calls to mind such environmentalist classics as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring(1962).
A powerfully researched and important look at the ravages of nuclear waste remediation.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-0520395114
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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