Full Body Burden
Authors: Kristen Iversen
FULL BODY BURDEN
A
Mother Jones
Best Book of 2012
A
Kirkus Reviews Best
Book of 2012
An
Atlantic Monthly
Best Book about Justice
“A deft rebellion against the silences, public and intimate, that have proven disastrous for [Iversen’s] community.”
—
Mother Jones
“A striking tale of innocence in a time and a place of great danger.”
“A shocking and salutary coming-of-age memoir … A meticulously researched and compelling narrative of growing up in the ‘sacrifice’ zone of America’s nuclear weapons programme … One of those rare, life-changing works whose quiet, insistent moral authority commands us to read on and to remember.”
—
Telegraph
(UK)
“An intriguing mix of memoir and first-class investigative journalism …
Mad Men
meets
Erin Brockovich
.”
—
Independent
(UK)
“A carefully pruned memoir … [Iversen’s] greatest feat, beyond her clear exposition of decades of scientific mismanagement, is to explain our capacity to ignore what seems too deeply embedded to fix.”
—
Portland Mercury
“[Iversen’s] book is simultaneously a careful memoir of a haunted childhood and a ferocious interrogation of deliberate environmental and public health neglect, and its slow revelation of family and government secrets has the hypnotic force of a horror story.”
—
Maryn McKenna
,
Wired.com
“Intimate … [Iversen’s] blending of fact-based reporting with such narrative warmth is no small achievement.”
“[Iversen’s] writing mixes the lyrical and the logical. This is a real coming-of-age-in-nuclear-America story.… Iversen’s tale joins the growing ranks of what might be termed ‘environmental memoir,’ a genre popularized by a cadre of women directly indebted to Rachel Carson: Terry Tempest Williams (
Refuge
), Sandra Steingraber (
Living Downstream
), Nancy Nichols (
Lake Effect
), and Nancy Langston (
Toxic Bodies
).”
—
OnEarth
“Iversen seems to have been destined to write this shocking and infuriating story of a glorious land and a trusting citizenry poisoned by Cold War militarism and ‘hot’ contamination, secrets and lies, greed and denial.… News stories come and go. It takes a book of this exceptional caliber to focus our attention and marshal our collective commitment to preventing future nuclear horrors.”
—
Booklist
(starred review)
“With meticulous reporting and a clear eye for details, Iversen has crafted a chilling, brilliantly written cautionary tale about the dangers of blind trust.…
Full Body Burden
is both an engrossing memoir and a powerful piece of investigative journalism.”
—
BookPage
“What makes this book so powerful is not only this persistent revealing of the truth, but also Iversen’s ability to shift gears from the journalistic and factual to the aesthetic and metaphorical.”
—
Brevity
“Poignant and gracefully written, Iversen shows us what it meant to come of age next door to Rocky Flats—America’s plutonium bomb factory. The story is at once terrifying and outrageous.”
—
Kai Bird
, coauthor of the Pulitzer Prize–winning
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
“What a surprise! You don’t expect such (unobtrusively) beautiful writing in a book about nuclear weapons, nor such captivating storytelling. Plus the facts are solid and the science is told in colloquial but never dumbed-down terms.”
—
Mark Hertsgaard
, author of
Nuclear Inc
. and
Hot
“This terrifyingly brilliant book—as perfectly crafted and meticulously assembled as the nuclear bomb triggers that lie at its core—is a savage indictment of the American strategic weapons industry, haunting in its power yet wonderfully, charmingly human as a memoir of growing up in the Atomic Age.”
—
Simon Winchester
, author of
The Professor and the Madman
and
Atlantic
“Why didn’t Poe or Hitchcock think of this?
Full Body Burden
has all the elements of a classic horror tale: the charming nuclear family cruising innocently above the undercurrents of nuclear nightmare. But it’s true and all the more chilling.… A gripping and scary story.”
—
Bobbie Ann Mason
, author of
Shiloh and Other Stories
and
In Country
“A powerful and beautiful account, of great use to all of us who will fight the battles that lie ahead.”
—
Bill McKibben
, author of
The End of Nature
and
Eaarth
“Part memoir, part investigative journalism,
Full Body Burden
is a tale that will haunt your dreams.”
—
John Dufresne
, author of
Louisiana Power & Light
and
Love Warps the Mind a Little
“This is a subject as grippingly immediate as today’s headlines: While there is alarm about the small rise in radioactivity in the food chain, one reads in these pages about how a whole region lived in the steady contaminating effects of nuclear radiation. Iversen’s prose is clean and clear and lovely, and her story is deeply involving and full of insight and knowledge.… It ought to be required reading for every single legislator in this country.”
—
Richard Bausch
, author of
Peace
and
Something Is Out There
“Kristen Iversen’s ingenious fusion of these two tales—her family’s ongoing denial of her father’s alcoholism with one of the most successful cover-ups in the history of the U.S. military machine—increases the half-life of her story’s power to affect our lives exponentially.… As a Coloradoan, as a U.S. citizen, I can’t imagine a more effective lifting of the shroud of Rocky Flats.”
—
Pam Houston
, author of
Contents May Have Shifted
and
Cowboys Are My Weakness
“This wonderfully human, deeply engaging and rigorously researched memoir is both a great book and one of the most important books you will ever read. Loving, profound, necessary, beautiful, its message is essential to our happiness and our survival.”
—
Rikki Ducornet
, author of
Netsuke
and
The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition
This is a work of nonfiction. Some of the names have been changed to protect individuals’ privacy. The use of pseudonyms is indicated in the endnotes.
Copyright © 2012, 2013 by Kristen Iversen
Reader’s Guide copyright © 2013 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Paperbacks, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
Broadway Paperbacks and its logo, a letter B bisected on the diagonal, are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
“Extra Libris” and the accompanying colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Crown Publishers, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2012.
All (66) lines from “Plutonian Ode” from
Collected Poems 1947–1980
by Allen Ginsberg
Copyright © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg.
Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Full body burden : growing up in the nuclear shadow of Rocky Flats / Kristen Iversen.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Iversen, Kristen. 2. Rocky Flats Plant (U.S.)—Environmental aspects. 3. Rocky Flats Plant (U.S.)—History. 4. Rocky Flats Plant (U.S.)—Health aspects. 5. Nuclear weapons plants—Health aspects—Colorado. 6. Plutonium—Health aspects—Colorado. 7. Radioactive waste sites—Cleanup—Colorado. 8. Radioactive pollution—Colorado—Jefferson County. 9. Jefferson County (Colorado)—Biography. I. Iversen, Kristen. II. Title: Growing up in the nuclear shadow of Rocky Flats.
TD195.N85I84 2012
363.17’990978884—dc23 2011045902
eISBN: 978-0-307-95564-7
FRONTISPIECE PHOTOGRAPH BY ROBERT L. TELISCHAK
COVER DESIGN BY EVAN GAFFNEY
COVER BACKGROUND IMAGE: LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, PRINTS & PHOTOGRAPHS
DIVISION, HAER COLO, 30-GOLD. V, 1–8
v3.1_c1
For my family: my siblings, Karin, Karma, and Kurt;
my father; and in loving memory of my mother.
Most of all, this book is for Sean and Nathan,
who have lived with it from the beginning
.
I suppose my thinking began to be affected soon after atomic science was firmly established. Some of the thoughts that came were so unattractive to me that I rejected them completely, for the old ideas die hard, especially when they are emotionally as well as intellectually dear to one. It was pleasant to believe, for example, that much of Nature was forever beyond the tampering reach of man—he might level the forests and dam the streams, but the clouds and the rain and the wind were God’s.
—
RACHEL CARSON