Disturbing and well-documented—and hopefully effective. Though tribal leaders have banned yellow-dirt extraction, mining...
Former Los Angeles Times reporter Pasternak debuts with an explosive account of U.S. neglect of the Navajo Indians during the rush to find the uranium required to create the first atomic bomb.
In the 1940s, private companies began mining operations on the Navajo Nation reservation, which covers 27,000 square miles of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Hiring tribal people as miners, the firms unearthed the “yellow dirt,” or uranium, needed for the Manhattan Project. For years, until the federal government finally had a surfeit of uranium in 1957, Navajos, many impoverished, continued working the mines, extracting four million tons of uranium ore and never knowing that their exposure to radiation could cause cancers and birth defects. The “slow environmental catastrophe” harmed several generations and continues to contaminate air and water for many of the 180,000 people on the reservation. Pasternak’s complex book, winner of a J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award, details this largely unknown story in a narrative that will leave readers outraged over the largely uncaring and callous behavior of U.S. and corporate officials who were well aware of the mining’s toll on the Navajo. In 1948, the Atomic Energy Commission disregarded its Colorado health chief’s call for safeguards at uranium mines and mills, claiming it was the responsibility of state safety inspectors (who had no training in radiation). In 1952, Colorado and federal health officials were ignored when they urged improved ventilation and other mining safeguards. Two years later, federal research teams began monitoring the health of miners, producing data for the U.S. military on the effects of radiation. Pasternak writes that the pressure to produce uranium for the U.S. weapons program, conflicting agency priorities and the anticipated high costs of addressing health issues at hundreds of mines, all helped prevent action. Her own 2006 Times investigative series spurred congressional hearings and steps by federal agencies, including an ongoing clean-up of Navajo homes built of contaminated rocks.
Disturbing and well-documented—and hopefully effective. Though tribal leaders have banned yellow-dirt extraction, mining companies hope to resume operations.Pub Date: Sept. 21, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9482-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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