This is a book about secrets- family secrets and government secrets. An incredible memoir and expose about growing up next to America's most important nuclear facility of the Cold War era.
Kristen Iversen teaches creative writing at the University of Memphis, where she lives with her two sons.
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
*Sunday Telegraph*
Full Body Burden is one of the most important stories of the
nuclear era. It’s an essential and unforgettable book that should
be talked about in schools and book clubs, online and in the White
House
*Rebecca Skloot, author of 'The Immortal Life of Henrietta
Lacks'*
As [Iversen] and her primary school classmates were being taught to
duck and cover pathetically when the Soviets finally struck, they
were all along coming under silent attack from their own
government. Against a bracingly realised backdrop of the rural
American mountain west, Iversen recounts a superficially untroubled
childhood of horse-riding, jumping in lakes and kissing boys. Yet
it is turned chilling by our steadily mounting knowledge, and her
happy ignorance at the time, of what was going on just a few miles
upwind without the consent of those being polluted
*Literary Review*
An intriguing mix of memoir and first-class investigative
journalism, a sort of Mad Men meets Erin Brockovich
*Independent*
Superb... her prose combines perceptive lyricism with stark
brutality
*New Scientist*
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