wigstown 's review for:

Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats by Kristen Iversen

3.0

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Having grown up in the long shadow of Rocky Flats, I was more than curious about this book. Iversen says she wrote it to confront two of her life's biggest fears -- the plutonium trigger plant and her father's alcoholism. I wish she had written two books, one of her suburban coming of age and one of the plant. Her two fears don't always lock together. Her greatest generation parents (like mine) did prove to be fallible, lost in the boom and bustle of the 50s and 60s. But how did their failures always link to the failures of Rocky Flats. I do applaud Iversen for the tales I'd never really heard or paid enough attention to, that confirmed my niggling suspicions that all the cancer deaths in my neighborhood had something more than genetics in their making. I am amazed by the dangerous miscues and mess-ups of the greatest generation government. I have to ask why I wasn't paying more attention and thank Iversen for shaking me awake.