In the wake of the 2011 Fukushima meltdown, as well as nuclear disasters in recent years at nuclear power plants and weapons sites such as Chernobyl in the Ukraine, the Mayak facility in Russia, Rocky Flats in Colorado, and former nuclear weapons sites like Hanford in Washington and Fernald in Ohio, the safety of America’s nuclear industry is receiving fresh scrutiny, as are the issues of waste disposal and global nuclear disarmament.
Kristen Iversen’s haunting new book Full Body Burden draws on extensive interviews, FBI and EPA documents, and class-action testimony, along with her own experiences growing up just miles from Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated “the most contaminated site in America”, to present a full picture about a childhood lived in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and—unknown to those who lived there—tainted with invisible deadly particles of plutonium.
KRISTEN IVERSEN grew up in Arvada, Colorado near the Rocky Flats nuclear weaponry facility and received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver. She is Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at The University of Memphis and also Editor-in-Chief of The Pinch, an award-winning literary journal. She is also the author of Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, winner of the Colorado Book Award for Biography and the Barbara Sudler Award for Nonfiction.
