Book description
In the early 1950s, men from the government decide to build a secret
nuclear weapons facility at Rocky Flats. Its job will be to refine
plutonium and mould it into the triggers at the heart of every one of
the country's nuclear weapons. Decades later, it will be branded 'the
most contaminated site in America'.
A few miles down the road, Kristen Iversen is enjoying a carefree,
outdoor childhood in a sublime setting of desert and mountains. She
and her siblings jump streams, ride horses, live a happy outdoors
life. But beneath this veneer the family is quietly falling apart. Her
father drinks, her mother copes. And in a series of fires, accidents
and other catastrophic leaks, Rocky Flats is spewing an invisible
cocktail of the most dangerous substances on earth into this pristine
landscape. The ground, the air and the water are all alive with radiation.
The years that follow will bring protests, investigations, denials,
cover-ups, threats and lies. And then, one after another, people start
to fall ill.
Full Body Burden is a brilliant work of investigative
journalism and a searing memoir. It is a book about secrets: the small
ones families hide from each other and the even more dangerous ones
governments hide from us.
Kristen Iversen teaches creative writing at the University of
Memphis, where she lives with her two sons.
