A review by holyshark
Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara

emotional informative medium-paced

2.75

a really gut wrenching, heartbreaking, devastating book about how hellish life is in the DRC while they mine for cobalt which is probably in the laptop i'm typing this from right now. i bawled my eyes out when people were recounting their time in the mines.

i have two major qualms with the book: 1) siddarth kara can write, but i hated when he was making literary speculations about deaths — the deaths are incredibly tragic themselves and kara didn't need to emotionally manipulate the reader, or add anything like "did he cry out for his mother?". 2) in the audiobook, the narrator puts on a "congolese" accent and a "chinese" accent when he's reading quotes out from the book. in WHAT world was that necessary?? distasteful, icky, and docked stars for this.