A powerfully researched and important look at the ravages of nuclear waste remediation.
Cram offers a study of the limits and failures of nuclear cleanup and its safety risks.
This latest volume in the University of California Press’ Critical Environments series on nature, science, and politics takes a sweeping look at strategies for the remediation of nuclear harm. It focuses on the Hanford Site in eastern Washington state, where it estimates that 56 million gallons of radioactive waste product are stored in underground tanks, and nine reactors and five chemical processing plants contaminated the soil with about 450 billion gallons of liquid waste. Cram is a professor at the University of Washington Bothell’s School of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences. Every member of her immediate family was diagnosed with cancer (including the author), and both her parents died of it; her mother grew up in eastern Washington. “It matters that I want to know what caused my family’s cancer. And it matters that I will never be able to fully answer that question,” Cram writes. Working outward from the Hanford site and backward in time to the Castle-Bravo nuclear test in 1954—a detonation whose irradiated ash poisoned the crew of the Japanese fishing boat Lucky Dragon—Cram works to find answers to a question posed by Hanford scientist Jack Healy: “How do we strike a proper balance between the interests of the individual and the interests of the Nation?” What does it mean, Cram asks, “to safeguard individual bodies with regulations that only envision disembodied statistical aggregates?” It’s a problem, she notes, that’s worsened by the fact that the disembodied statistics are skewed: She writes that women and children, for instance, are far more likely to develop radiation-caused cancers than the adult male “Reference Man” in industry use. In prose that’s both calm and solidly grounded in cited research, Cram presents a flatly devastating book about egregious mismanagement at the Hanford site and, more broadly, about the United States government’s calculation of risk in the field of nuclear waste disposal—a problem that, as Cram rightly points out, will certainly outlast the government itself. The result is a quietly devastating indictment that calls to mind such environmentalist classics as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring(1962).
A powerfully researched and important look at the ravages of nuclear waste remediation.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 978-0520395114
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Univ. of California
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.
A memoir on the making of a literal “jailhouse lawyer.”
Wrongfully arrested and convicted of murder in New Orleans, which at the time had “the highest rate of wrongful convictions in the nation, with nearly all the victims being Black men who…grew up poor,” Duncan served for 23 years in Louisiana’s notorious Angola prison and other institutions. He might have done his time at the Orleans Parish Prison, but, he writes, he wanted access to Angola’s more extensive law library. Well before being transferred there, he petitioned the Louisiana Supreme Court for a law book, a motion denied because it had not first been adjudicated in a lower court. A sympathetic judge gave him a copy all the same, and Duncan was off to a career as an inmate advocate, regularly filing petitions and lawsuits on his own behalf and that of his fellow prisoners—the first suit being “over the jail’s failure to provide him with a high-fiber diet,” soon followed by motions to provide mental health treatment, end beatings and arbitrary punishments, and improve medical care. Known as the “Snickers Lawyer” for taking payment in candy, he became a self-taught expert on constitutional issues. Naturally, he recounts, he was targeted by guards and wardens for his legal activism, even as he proved essential to Angola’s population; in time, too, he found a few unlikely allies among the staff. Duncan’s well-told story is full of fraught moments of abuse both physical and judicial, though it has something of a happy ending in that, after earning a law degree after his release, he was exonerated of the crime and has since been fighting for other prisoners to “have meaningful access to the courts.”
An eye-opening look at prison life from the point of view of a true warrior for justice.Pub Date: July 8, 2025
ISBN: 9780593834305
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
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