Full Body Burden

Reviews

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 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 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 An intriguing mix of memoir and first-class investigative journalism, a sort of Mad Men meets Erin Brockovich Superb... her prose combines perceptive lyricism with stark brutality Expand reviews