KILLING OUR OWN: The Disaster of America's Experience with Atomic Radiation

by Harvey & Norman Solomon with Robert Alvarez & Eleanor Walters Wasserman ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 30, 1982

The names are famous and not so famous: Nagasaki; Bikini; Eniwetok; the Nevada Test Site; St. George, Utah; Fredonia, Arizona; Tonopah, Nevada; Shippingport; Three Mile Island. The cast is similarly big- and little-time: Truman, Strauss, Libby, Rickover, Sakharov, Harry Coppola, Claude Cooper, Kristen Haag. They are the places and persons who figure in this encyclopedic recording of sickness and death following exposure to radioactive materials, to fallout, or to the contamination of the countryside following nuclear tests, reactor accidents, and so on. The authors review not only radiation from atom tests but also from X-rays and nuclear medicine. Wasserman et al. have dug hard and interviewed at length to come up with myriad case histories of men, women, children, and animals who died of multiple myeloma, leukemia, lung cancer, and a list of brutal debilitating and disfiguring disorders attributed to the effects of radiation. With all this morbidity, with indictments of coverup and callousness on the part of the VA, DOE, and AEC, there are inevitably some exaggerations and innuendoes as well as some superheroes who emerge as Forces of Good. Nevertheless, the overall telling is convincing--firm documentation of past disasters and a complement to Daniel Ford's Three Mile Island (p. 281, J-69).

Pub Date: April 30, 1982

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1982

Categories: NONFICTION