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

by Kristen Iversen

Full Body Burden is a haunting work of narrative nonfiction about a young woman, Kristen Iversen, growing up in a small Colorado town close to Rocky Flats, a secret nuclear weapons plant once designated "the most contaminated site in America." It's the story of a childhood and adolescence in the shadow of the Cold War, in a landscape at once startlingly beautiful and—unknown to those who lived there—tainted with invisible yet deadly particles of plutonium.

It's also a book about the destructive power of secrets—both family and government. Her father's hidden liquor bottles, the strange cancers in children in the neighborhood, the truth about what was made at Rocky Flats (cleaning supplies, her mother guessed)—best not to inquire too deeply into any of it.

But as Iversen grew older, she began to ask questions. She learned about the infamous 1969 Mother's Day fire, in which a few scraps of plutonium spontaneously ignited and—despite the desperate efforts of firefighters—came perilously close to a "criticality," the deadly blue flash that signals a nuclear chain reaction. Intense heat and radiation almost melted the roof, which nearly resulted in an explosion that would have had devastating consequences for the entire Denver metro area. Yet the only mention of the fire was on page 28 of the Rocky Mountain News, underneath a photo of the Pet of the Week. In her early thirties, Iversen even worked at Rocky Flats for a time, typing up memos in which accidents were always called "incidents."

And as this memoir unfolds, it reveals itself as a brilliant work of investigative journalism—a detailed and shocking account of the government's sustained attempt to conceal the effects of the toxic and radioactive waste released by Rocky Flats, and of local residents' vain attempts to seek justice in court. Here, too, are vivid portraits of former Rocky Flats workers—from the healthy, who regard their work at the plant with pride and patriotism, to the ill or dying, who battle for compensation for cancers they got on the job.

Based on extensive interviews, FBI and EPA documents, and class-action testimony, this taut, beautifully written book promises to have a very long half-life.

Genres: Nonfiction, Memoir, History, Book Club, Science, Biography, Politics

416 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2012

About the author

Kristen Iversen is the author of Full Body Burden Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, a finalist for the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, and Molly Brown Unraveling the Myth, winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Barbara Sudler Award for Nonfiction. Full Body Burden was chosen by Kirkus Reviews and the American Library Association as one of the Best Books of 2012 and named 2012 Best Book about Justice by The Atlantic. Iversen’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, Reader’s Digest, and many other publications. She has appeared on C-Span and NPR’s Fresh Air and worked extensively with A&E Biography, The History Channel, and the NEH. She holds a Ph.D from the University of Denver and currently teaches in the PhD program in creative writing at the University of Cincinnati. She is also the author of a textbook, Shadow Boxing Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction.

Reviews

[Moira]

Bought this after hearing about it, because I love the West and the nuclear power stories set in it (think Desert Bloom), and especially after reading this NYTBR review. I should have remembered Dwight Garner is FUCKING USELESS when it comes to actually recommending books. Book bloggers all suck, right? Well, Garner didn't mention the prose style of this book is painfully cliched from the start (yes, of course it is written in the first person present tense, it's apparently illegal to publish a memoir that isn't nowadays):

They need a roll-up-your-sleeves, get-down-to-business, high-production bomb factory. (WHERE was the editor. A factory rolling up its sleeves?)

....the news breaks like a thunderbolt over the community.

Construction of the plant is rushed. Not even the governor has an inkling. (AN INKLING.)

It should be a rule: anyone for whom "criteria" is forever singular is likely to be a shitty writer.

And is it a law that journalists writing at book length have to employ a certain number of cliches, else they'll be left out in the cold in the breadlines? (The cliches. Not the journalists. Altho it might not be an idea to leave some journalists in the breadlines too. But OH, IF WE HAD TO DEPEND ON THE INTERNET FOR NEWS, civilization would end! Because the internet brought us Fox News and the CNN Headline channel! Right, right.)

I'll keep reading this, but, Jesus, Dwight, couldn't you have mentioned something about her shitty prose style? ("His path to becoming an engineer has been hard won." A hard won path. Yes indeed.) It probably doesn't bother other people this much, but reading prose this flat for me is like nails down an inner aural chalkboard.

But, lest you think I'm just a picky bitch*, as Orwell famously pointed out, 'if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.' The phrases that grate on me so are precisely the kind he's describing -- "prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse." (I love him disapproving of the prefabricated henhouse.) To consider the example of "hard won path" above, it's clear she either thinks his position was 'hard won' or he had a 'hard path,' but she's not thinking about what she's writing, so it mushes together into this meaningless little glob most people rush over. I have an eye for typos (seriously, it's just a thing - like some people have perfect pitch - drives bosses nuts) and other infelicities, so when I read that, it's like stubbing my toe, and I hop around and curse while other people wonder, What the fuck is wrong with her? Why is she making such a fuss? Perhaps this kind of - to be Orwellian** - "slovenly," "ugly," "inaccurate" writing doesn't do much harm in a blog post, or a newspaper editorial, or even a review in a Newspaper of Record (if you forget the cursing reader who feels duped by the reviewer leaving out that the writer in question DOES NOT KNOW HOW TO GRAMMAR, but anyway). But this is a popular-yet-serious book on a terribly modern topic -- the acceptance of horrifying pollutants as a side effect of producing even more horrifying weapons, the sacrifice of "ordinary" (i.e. poor, usually non-white) citizens, the betrayal of trust in the idea that as they sleep and eat and drink water from faucets they are not being systematically poisoned, by the very government which has told them that weapon production is for their own safety and protection. And, if found out, the government will then lie about the illnesses and deaths its citizens have suffered, often in cloudy, meaningless, hackneyed phrases. Such a topic might even be deemed Orwellian. Surely it deserves clear, or at the very least accurate, language.


(I clearly must start previewing first chapters on the Kindle before just buying something. I probably would've bought it anyway, because I'm interested in the story - I grew up in Santa Fe and the joke was if WWIII broke out, we'd be radioactive toast because of LANL - but I might not've been so put off and disappointed.)


*OK, I'm a picky bitch. No denying that. But listen.

**Just think about what that typically means, won't you. Does it mean precise and clear? Anti-Fascist? No, it has come to be a synonym for "totalitarian." "An Orwellian future," &c &c. Not that all kinds of this shorthand are bad - think "Dickensian Christmas," or "Dostoyevsian squalor." But it seems particularly fitting (no, not ironic, fuck you) that Orwell's name itself has become a kind of symbol for the sloppy thinking he was against. Perhaps he is grimly amused, somewhere.


ETA Finished it all, and the creepy head-replacement-on-the-32-fouettés-en-tournant problem is intensified by her not actually being there for most of the big scenes she describes -- the early protests at Rocky Flats, the judgement in the class action lawsuit, the big fire her high school crush fights near the end. To her credit, she's up-front about being out of the state, and even the country, while this is all going on, but then the inevitable question arises: if she's just basically stitching together evidence like a good reporter, why couldn't the book be written by a....better reporter? Or a better writer. She does go to work at Rocky Flats, very briefly, which is apparently the catalyst which snaps her out of her life-long denial and gives her the idea to write a book, but, in true twentieth-century fashion, she doesn't realize what was actually going on while she was working there until she sees a Nightline report.

Perhaps this is just being true to her times - our generation is the one that grew up seeing it all on the small screen (just as the next generation is the one that grew up seeing it all on the ever-smaller screens of their iThings) - but, in the hands of a skilled writer, this could have been used to creepy I-alone-am-escaped-to-tell-thee effect. Here it's just baffling, and finally annoying. Apparently she depended a lot on an earlier book, Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and the Nuclear West, written by 'a former editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists....now a professor of journalism at the University of Colorado, Boulder.' But good ol' Dwight Garner didn't mention that one.

[Bonnie G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

My professor for Professional Responsibility (that is ethics for those who are not familiar with law school euphemisms) was a rather brilliant libertarian crank who had been for some time Ayn Rand's lawyer. One day he got into it (not for the first or last time) with one of our more loudmouthed classmates who is now a loudmouthed real estate developer who has public screaming matches with advocates for the environment and racial and economic justice. When the classmate was backed into a corner in the argument he yelled "Law has nothing to do with justice!" Every day for the rest of the term the prof wrote those words on the board followed by an attribution to that student whom I won't name here. As I read this book I kept thinking of that. Law has nothing to do with justice. I may not agree on much with that loudmouth student or with that libertarian prof but on this point we all come together.

Full Body Burden is the story of the history and impact of Rocky Flats, likely the most hazardous nuclear waste site in the US and the one for which the smallest amount of remediation and redress has been forthcoming. The government denies Rocky Flats is an issue despite having radioactive material in the soil and groundwater at rates higher than Nagasaki just after we bombed it. In fact Rocky Flats has been turned into a recreational area and wildlife preserve. But that is not the only story here. Don't miss the rest of the subtitle; The book is also about Kristen Iverson growing up. The cone of silence around Iverson's fracturing family is but a subset of the cone of silence around most things that are thought to be embarrassing, or which could prove inconvenient, like industrial poisoning that hurt or killed thousands of people. I grew up in the same type of corrosive environment a few years later and a 1000 miles away, but it was all recognizable. I was floored by how seamlessly Iverson knitted together the story of the Rocky Flats plant and the many people who died or were physically damaged by the cavalier flinging about of plutonium and other radioactive materials, and the destruction of a family forced into silence as they were ravaged by their father's alcoholism and their mother's repression and denial. Iverson's approach to the material is brilliant and innovative and she is a hell of a good writer. I have had this book on my shelf for years and every time I looked at it I thought it would be dry, but it was so far from that. It was riveting and affecting and infuriating, but not dry.

The moronic innocence of the 70's (see no evil, hear no evil, etc.) would be sad and sweet if it could be left to nostalgia, but alas most people still live there, ignoring things that will destroy us individually and collectively because it is inconvenient to stop things that provide jobs and/or increase comfort. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said “We will go down in history as the first society that wouldn't save itself because it wasn't cost effective.” Kurt was a true sage.

This is a very very good book. If you have a chance to read it, you should do that.

[Susan (aka Just My Op) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having lived for more than 40 years in Colorado, but thankfully, not in the shadows of Rocky Flats, I was both interested in and woefully uninformed about what went on at this facility for producing plutonium "triggers." Now that I've read the book, I know that the "woefully unaware" part is not entirely my fault - great effort was made to keep me and everyone else unaware and misinformed.

Full Body Burden is both an expose of Rocky Flats and a memoir of someone growing up almost literally in its shadow. The author grew up in a time when kids were sent outside to play in the morning and not expected to come home until dinner. As a memoir, the book was warm and thoughtful, but I was appalled at the revolving door attitude towards pets that came and went. As in so many memoirs now, alcoholism was involved, but this was not a "poor little me" type of story.

As an expose of Rocky Flats, I was appalled by all that went on there, by the intentional secrecy and lies, by the disregard for safety and care. All these years later, records are still sealed, whistle blowers have had their lives ruined. And of course, people closest to the plant have paid the greatest price.

And when RF was dismantled, I thought that clean up meant clean up. Silly me. I have always been bothered with nuclear facilities because of the problem of disposal of the waste, lethal substances with half-lives sometimes in the millions of years, with the devil-may-care attitude that someone will figure out something later. I learned that there are so many more problems than just that.

The negatives to the book are that the story was not always told in a linear manner, and the skipping around was sometimes hard to follow, and that there was too much repetition, particularly of scientific facts important to the story. Still, I found it quite interesting and eye-opening.

I was given a copy of the book for review, for which I am grateful.

[Lindsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hmmm, so all the other reviews are singing this book's praises, but I thought it was lacking. The book features two inter-connecting stories: a rather typical coming-of-age story and the terrible history of contamination by a facility making plutonium buttons for nuclear weapons. The coming-of-age story is well written but something you've read a hundred times before (title character feels isolated, different; her father is an alcoholic and her mother suffers from regret and depression). The pieces about the toxic contamination is told like a series of facts without any narrative momentum - it was like reading transcripts most of the time.

[Bonnie Brody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Be prepared to be terrified, amazed and astounded as you read this book about the Nuclear horror of Rocky Flats near Denver, Colorado. Like Los Alamos, it is a research facility, builder of plutonium triggers and this site was initiated to fight our part of the cold war. Right in the back yard of this nuclear test site and plutonium harvester, were homes where children played in the smudge of plutonium, rode horses across contaminated land, and drank water from poisoned wells.

Kristen Iversen intersperses the history of Rocky Flats with the story of her Nordic Family - a family that keeps secrets and does not speak out of turn - and do they ever have a lot of secrets to keep. Kristen's father is an attorney who is heading down the deep slope of alcoholism, her mother refuses to acknowledge what is happening at Rocky Flats. She talks about cleaning agents being manufactured there.

Despite the workers coming down with epidemiological markers for cancer, the government just won't take the people seriously. There are more agents of the government that I could have ever imagined and each one is there to protect another agency. They work in tandem to keep the public relations good and the people fooled.

Kristen has spent years writing this book, interviewing people, going over court cases and following the problems from the very start. She opens with the Manhattan Project which began in 1942 and closes with the classic poem, 'Plutonium Ode' by Alan Ginserg. I grew up listening to Ginsberg and he was a brave poet who knew when to speak up and how to do it. He feared nothing and told the truth. Even in the days when homosexuality was in the closet, Ginsberg was out of the closet.

Ms. Iversen has done a grand job, much in the tradition of Body Toxic and A Civil Action. Both of these non-fiction books about the impact of atomic waste sites have served to raise the readers' consciousness and have informed us of the danger of radioactivity.

It is just as dangerous to try and clean up nuclear waste sites as it is to build them. Where does one put all the supposed 'cleaned up' material. It can't just be buried under contrete because activity takes place underground where soil shifts and animals burrow. On top of the land, flowers and weeds bloom on the site and blow in the wind for some poor soul to inhale.

This is a poetic and heart-wrenching book, one that is eye-opening and frightening to the infinite degree. I recommend that anyone who has an interest in what is happening with atomic energy read this. It is written in an accessible way, much like the two other books that I cited. Ms. Iversen has a great way with words.

The book could use a bit of editing but what I read was and uncorrected proof and I expect that further editing will be done. Thank you Ms. Iversen for opening our eyes to Rocky Flats and the underworld of 'full body burden'.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent read, illustrates how self-interest (above-average pay for the workers and production quota bonuses for the managing corporation), employee fear (of being fired), management’s fear (of being found out), led to the regional population surrounding this nuclear facility never asking hard questions - even as the cancers (in adults and children) mounted to abnormal levels and as scientists who reported their findings of abnormally high plutonium readings were fired. Anyone who spoke out against the plant was shunned and also put at great physical risk. (The FBI raided the facility in the 90's and it has been shut down, though the government continues to downplay the issue, just as it did long before the evidence became so overwhelming that one government agency raided another - the FBI versus the Department of Energy).

Reminds me of the advancement of the Nazi party where power, fear, and greed rendered a society (largely) impotent to stop the party's ultimate destruction of that society.

[Everyday eBook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kristen Iversen had what many would consider an idyllic childhood, in a suburban house with avocado appliances, a horse, and parents who liked each other. Each afternoon after school, she would ride out to the edge of town. There, at the barbed wire, kicking the metal "No Trespassing" signs with the toes of her cowboy boots, she would look to the west. There: where the chinook winds came racing, swirling dust, past the eerie lights of the plant that made … something secret. In Full Body Burden, her gripping memoir, Iversen unravels the secrets of what it meant to grow up in the shadow of Rocky Flats. Unfortunately, it's our story, too.

The Rocky Flats plant made the triggers at the heart of every atom bomb made in America from the 1950s to the 1980s. These coffee-cup sized lumps of plutonium, one of the most deadly materials ever discovered, could be made to set off a mushroom cloud of destructive energy. But nobody talked about this, because it was the Cold War, and it meant jobs for the community. "I don't know what he does, exactly," one wife says. "He's an engineer. It's too complicated to explain."

Similarly, nobody talked about the self-destruction of Iversen's father, an attorney who sank deeper and deeper into alcoholic despair. The family closed ranks in denial, as so many troubled families do. The stories are integrally linked, as they go to the heart of a kind of collective amnesia. There are things that we just don't want to know.

Sooner or later, though, we have to face them -- or do we? As one child after another in Iversen's school developed testicular cancer, and as one plant worker after another died of lymphoma or a brain tumor or lung cancer, it became clear that something was very wrong at Rocky Flats. Like the deadly fire and explosion in 1957, and again in 1969, that sent a plume of radioactive dust toward Denver. Like the hundreds of rusting steel drums, filled with toxic, radioactive slurry, leaking into the groundwater, because nobody knew where else to put it. In some areas downwind of the plant, the soil was found to be more radioactive than "Ground Zero" at the Nevada nuclear test site. But this went on for decades, and nobody stopped it.

Full Body Burden is so powerful because it is personal. Iversen, who directs a Creative Writing MFA program, knows how to tell a story. But she also speaks with honesty about her childhood friends and neighbors, and the tension between knowing and willfully not knowing. We accept the nuclear weapons that protect us without asking about the thousands who died as a result of their manufacture, or about land near Denver that will remain deadly and radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. This is an important story about an American tragedy, but it's also about growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, when our country's innocence began its slow meltdown.

Head to www.EverydayeBook.com for more eBook reviews

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

After a day of reflection I changed my 3 stars to 2. I had stopped listening to the book a few times, questioning whether I should continue - I suppose I continued only out of inertia. The entire time I listened I had been put off by Iversen's use of present tense (she used present tense for her family memoir and also in her recounting of the history of Rocky Flats). That and the repetitions gave the book a stilted, limited perspective and a monotony. (People! Present tense isn't always appropriate!)

Then, to instill distrust in this reader, there were some clumsy word choices (e.g., calling a crowd's applause of a speaker "sporadic" when she clearly intended "scattered"). Also , she rigged the two accounts (the family memoir and the accounts of Rocky Flats) to make them appear to link - when they didn't really inform each other (other than for the fact that she grew up a few miles from the site). She recounted the brief time she worked at Rocky Flats while a doctoral student, and she frequently reminded the reader of some chronic illnesses that she and her siblings have suffered - but at the same time (literally - it's all present tense, recall) she insists that she and her parents and most of her siblings had no awareness or concern about the plutonium operations taking place a few miles away - that living next to Rocky Flats did not change or affect her childhood in any significant ways....

Lastly, it didn't seem to be investigative journalism (as the publishers' copy claimed); it was a both a memoir and a history. Each of which I felt I'd read before. So: just okay.

[Lena · Rating 4 out of 5]

By the time I first moved to Boulder in 1996, it was already known that Rocky Flats had contaminated a lot of the landscape nearby with nuclear waste while manufacturing plutonium bomb triggers for more than four decades. I did not pay a great deal of attention to this, however, since the plant was in the process of being cleaned up and rather far away (or so I thought).

Since moving out Boulder, however, I can now see the north edge of it on my way to work. So when I heard about Kristin Iversen's memoir chronicling growing up just a few miles away from the plant, I figured it was a good time to learn a little local history.

Hers is an extraordinarily sobering and eye-opening book.

It begins in the core of her own nuclear family, Midwestern transplants pursuing the American dream in the Denver suburb of Arvada, but it's not long before her personal history intersects with that of the top-secret plant. The author's overlay of her family's 1969 Mother's Day celebration at an Italian restaurant with snippets of an out of control plutonium fire happening at the plant - and the gale force winds blowing a still unknown amount of fallout over her family and thousands of others that day - sets a compelling tone for the book.

Iversen is a fluid and spare writer, and though I wasn't sure how interested I would be in her family's personal story, I soon found myself drawn in to her recollection of a deeply recognizable American childhood. Hers is a family whose Scandinavian tendencies towards silent suffering are enhanced by both deepening familial tragedy and a neighborhood commitment to both patriotic and pragmatic denial of where much of the community's money comes from. She grew up thinking the plant, run by Dow at the time, manufactured Scrubbing Bubbles. And though she does not know the mud at the bottom of the swimming hole she is dared to jump into as a kid is contaminated with dense plutonium, our knowledge of that fact makes for a fraught reading experience.

Iversen discusses in depth the dedicated work of those who eventually broke the conspiracy of silence about the danger in and around the plant, and though the grand jury evidence that drove its eventual shutdown remains sealed, enough information has leaked to make it clear that major crimes were committed against an unsuspecting public in the name of Cold War expediency. It's also clear that a lot of people got sick because of the prioritization of production over safety, and it's heartbreaking to read about the individuals Iversen highlights.

The official line of the government is that the plant area is essentially cleaned up now and poses no further danger to the public. But the burrowing animals who live deeper than the surface layer of decontaminated soil don't know they shouldn't be bringing that buried plutonium up from below, and the 100-mile an hour winds that regularly visit the Front Range are likely to still blow it towards what is now several million people downwind.

In discussing the current state of the plant and the spate of new development that has grown up around it, Iversen briefly touches on the fact that many people worked for decades in the so-called "hot" zones of the plant with no ill effects, and that there is ambiguity in studies linking plutonium to health problems. It's clear she does not believe the official line that everything is just fine, however, and I came away from the book largely agreeing with her. While not everyone who lives in that area may be affected, the risk is still real, particularly for children. In weaving together her personal story with that of the larger community, Iversen does a beautiful job of highlighting how easily human beings still wield the tool of denial even when clear information is available.

[Denver Public Library · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rocky Flats is our nearby neighbor. How much do you know about it? You'll know a lot more if you read this memoir of a local girl whose childhood days were spent horseback riding, playing, and going to school along with many other kids in Arvada right near the boundary of Rocky Flats. Kristen Iverson interweaves her family's story with information about the historic and political developments that led to the closing of Rocky Flats as a working factory, the "cleanup" of the property, and its opening as a recreation site. This book is well worth reading to learn more about this neighbor with its radioactive material that will be with us for centuries and millenniums.

Get Full Body Burden from the Denver Public Library

- Becker

[Emily Kestrel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Four stars for content, but only two stars for execution--so three on average. Iversen writes about growing up in a Colorado suburb that was literally next door to a factory that made plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs, Rocky Flats. Over the years she became aware of controversies surrounding pollution and government denial and decided to write a book about it. The history of Rocky Flats and the on-going denial of the dangers of the decades of toxic waste it produced is definitely worth a book, and I would tentatively recommend Full Body Burdern for that reason.

Unfortunately, I simply did not care for Iversen's approach or the writing style. She combines her own memoir along with the factual chapters about Rocky Flats, drawing awkward parallels between her own family history (alcoholism and denial) with the larger story of Rocky Flats (horrible pollution and denial). This combination of the personal and the political in creative nonfiction has produced some powerful books, like Refuge by Terry Tempest Williams and Folding Paper Cranes: An Atomic Memoir by Leonard Bird, but Iversen can't quite pull it off, in part because her own personal intersection with Rocky Flats is so vague (a brief temp job as a secretary isn't enough to pull it together). In fact, she is dismissive of the dangers of the factory for most of her life (believing it to produce harmless cleaning products and refusing to join her boyfriend in a protest), and was not even in Colorado for many of the events described in the book.

It doesn't quite work as a journalistic expose, either, as Iversen's creative nonfiction approach is sometimes hard to follow. She describes events witnessed by other people without attributing how she learned of them (in the context of the book itself; I did not read the acknowledgements at the end, where I assume she thanked those involved), sometimes jumping around in the timeline or from one person's POV to another, so that I would have to backtrack a couple pages to reorient myself.

A lot of this confusion has to do with her choice to use present tense for almost the entire book. To disclose my own personal bias, I loathe the current fad for using present tense in both fiction and memoir; I find it artificial and distracting. In Full Body Burden, the choice of tense is especially awkward, as she jumps back and forth in the timeline--from her childhood in the 1970s, then back to a 1960s fire at the factory, then to the 1980s when a particular person gets sick, etc.--and it's all told in the present tense. And then we have instances of using future tense to describe an event which actually happened in the past. The writing was otherwise prone to cliches and vague descriptions, but it was the abuse of the present tense that truly detracted from my appreciation of this book.

Overall summary: I didn't like this book because of the author's stylistic choices, but I still think the story of Rocky Flats is important to read about.

[Cheryl · Rating 5 out of 5]

After conducting meticulous and solid research, Kristen Iversen has compiled an outstanding, eloquent, haunting and shocking work that should be read by each and every one of us.

Iversen’s powerful narrative interweaves the story of her family life with the story of the establishment and operation of the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant near Denver, Colorado. Kristen’s family home bordered the property on which the Rocky Flats facility was built. She exposes the secret of her father’s alcoholism and its effect on her family, while also exposing the government’s deliberate deception and betrayal of the general population regarding the processing of lethal material and the resulting catastrophic accidents at Rocky Flats. It’s a powerful and cautionary tale about life in the nuclear age.

Although production at Rocky Flats has ceased, the aftereffects of the operations conducted at the site will have devastating and lingering consequences for the residents of the Denver metropolitan area for generations to come. I would highly recommend reading this book—it’s not an easy read. It is heartbreaking. But it is a warning about the willingness of the government to conceal from its citizens the truth about radioactive contamination in exchange for building and maintaining a nuclear arsenal. Martin Luther King once stated, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter”. In Full Body Burden, Kristen Iversen breaks the silence. Bravo, Kristen, bravo.

[Max Carmichael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must-read for all U.S. citizens, this book really tells it like it is. Government, science, and industry: they all do unspeakably evil things and lie about them afterward, from Washington officials and corporate executives to county commissioners and real estate developers. Rocky Flats wasn't the first and it won't be the last. And as Ms. Iversen so poignantly shows, the perpetrators go unpunished, the damage is irreversible, the victims have no recourse, and the majority of citizens don't want to hear about it or think about it.

The U.S. started the nuclear evil; the fault lies squarely with our government and our science. The Manhattan Project was a huge mistake, a tragic, unnecessary turn toward the dark side. All the good things accomplished by science are more than offset by the evil of nuclear technology, an evil that may outlast our species itself. We've created it and now we can't get rid of it. The only hope for life on this planet is that the human species will be stopped by ecosystem limits before we get a chance to irradiate everything on earth.

[Laura Lee Blackmer · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5. I learned a ton from this book and I appreciate all the research that went into providing this book. I’m very glad to have read it (especially since I just bought a house near Standley Lake). However, I expected this to be mostly an informational book. The mix between information about Rocky Flats and memoir on Kristen Iversen was weird. It would flip flop from plutonium facts to Kristen’s love life and it just kind of clashed. I also found it to be repetitive- I would be listening to something and think “did I accidentally go back?” Until she moved onto something else when I would realize I hadn’t gone back, I was just hearing the same statistic told in the same way for a second (or third) time. Lastly, she was pretty harsh on her dad and it felt like she just wanted to tell the world what an awful father he was. It felt cruel and unnecessary- and like a very counterproductive way to work through grievances with the way her father showed up in her life.

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent recounting of the complexity and dangers associated with the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons manufacturing facility located just outside Denver, CO. The author grew up in a Denver suburb just two miles downwind from the site, unknowingly playing outside in plutonium-contaminated soil, air, and water. She very effectively weaves the history of the Rocky Flats site with memoirs of her own childhood and family, which was troubled by her father's alcoholism. The theme linking both narratives is the danger of ignoring unpleasant, dangerous realities and how harmful secrets can be. Rocky Flats was a key production facility for nuclear weapons components during the Cold War, so there was a lot of secrecy about what exactly was happening there -- workers only knew how to do their one little task and weren't allowed to talk about anything. When there were fires and other releases of radioactivity, nobody told the local communities or local public health officials and instead the message over and over was about how safe the site was.

The details are what really made this book for me, both in terms of the author's writing style and the story she was telling. The tone is very factual and almost detached, but I think that's what makes it so persuasive: the facts she's describing are so horrifying and scary I felt sick at times. There was no need to dress anything up with melodramatic flourishes, and I appreciate that she didn't. One creepy anecdote that stands out is that after the FBI got involved in investigating environmental crimes at the site, some workers felt betrayed by a whistleblower who talked to the FBI and purposefully poked holes in her gloves that were supposed to protect her from the plutonium, which exposed her to a large radiation dose. So sick. I also had a hard time with the accounts of plutonium fires and the radiation exposure the firefighters absorbed in order to quell the fires and prevent larger disasters, like a criticality event that could have endangered the entire Denver area only 15 miles away. (!!!!)

In addition to recounting her own experience with the site, which included a short stint working there as a secretary and only becoming aware as an adult of the dangers the site truly posed, the author did a ton of research and interviews, and really does a good job at capturing the complexity of this type of situation: the attitudes of the line workers and mid-level managers at the plant who basically were just doing their jobs and believed in their mission of helping national security, workers who suspected they were doing something dangerous but were grateful for the high wages and benefits the jobs provided, local community members concerned about their property value and not wanting any kind of stigma attaching, other community members suffering from cancer and other diseases at higher rates than normal, the law enforcement complications when national security and nuclear anything are involved, etc. This was a story that needed to be told, and I can't think of a way it could have been done more effectively.

[Becky · Rating 4 out of 5]

"God in heaven, what have we done?" was my response to the book. Not for the feint of heart.

The residents around Rocky Flats spend decades pretending that the plutonium processing plant in the vicinity really just makes cleaning solutions, "scrubbing bubbles." The truth is too terrifying. Plus, the pay at the plant is good. You can even earn fifteen extra cents an hour for working in the "hot zone". When Iverson visits a doctor as an adult and wonders if her health condition could be connected to the radiation exposure she experienced in her neighborhood growing up, the doctor tells her that "you can't worry about that." The issue of nuclear waste and contamination of the environment is so overwhelming that many people really would like to turn a blind eye. We have created a situation that will persist for thousands, if not millions of years.

Iverson examines the decades of environmental catastrophe around Rocky Flats from myriad perspectives. The most riveting to me was her own memoir, which is intertwined with the larger corporate and governmental story. We also learn the story of the head of the operation, who earned millions of dollars of year while polluting the environment beyond repair. We learn a bit about the activists who protested at the site, and a lawyer who devoted his life to the cause of bringing justice to the residents of Rocky Flats. Iverson also provides us with insights into the lives of the people who worked at the plant, a large majority who developed devastating illnesses.

Iverson herself spent much of her life adhering to the culture of a code of silence. Now, with this meticulously researched book, she no longer turns away from the reality of the environmental devastation at Rocky Flats, and neither can we.

[Nancy Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kristen Iversen's story of growing up hard by a government facility that made plutonium "triggers" for nuclear bombs is a fascinating and well-written story of both deceit and naivete.

The radioactive nightmare of Rocky Flats was forced by the government onto the booming towns of Arvada, Golden, Wheat Ridge, and ultimately Denver, Colorado. The facility had hundreds of buildings, some so contaminated you could not enter without authorization. Radioactive waste seeped into the ground, spewed into the air, leaked from storage containers. Deadly fires threatened to annihilate not only the facility, but the entire population for miles around.

The government worked hard to assure people that they were in absolutely no danger, while at the same time monitoring the plant's employees for deadly doses of radiation. Clusters of cancers began to appear in and around the plant. People began dying. Yet still the plant chugged along.

To cope, Iversen says, people willed themselves to believe in the factory's benign nature. "No one knows what the factory will produce. No one cares. It means jobs. It means housing," she notes. People convinced themselves that because the plant was operated by Dow Chemical, they were making cleaning supplies there. "They would tell us if there was anything really bad, right?" she asks. Later, as a single mom in need of a job, Iversen ignores her inner doubts: she takes a job at the plant.

Iversen recounts her childhood in the 1960s and '70s playing in the streams and ponds surrounding the plant, biking in the "clean" Colorado air, riding her horse in the fields. Yet the threats to this seemingly idyllic childhood come not only from Rocky Flats, but also from within her family. Her father succumbs to alcoholism, and to escape the mounting chaos, her mother retreats to her bedroom for long afternoon "siestas." Iversen and her sisters tiptoe around the house, trying to avoid both parents.

Iversen tells a compelling tale, both through thorough reportage and the individual stories of people who work at the plant, the protesters who begin to waken to its dangers, the people who bring lawsuits that ultimately reveal the horrors of the plant, and her own reckoning with the monumental deception foisted on the American people.

[Jo · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have always figured if I got cancer it would be due to this place, but now I can FEEL the plutonium in my body. And the nightmare of Rocky Flats and what to do with the contaminated land has continued even after the conclusion of this book.

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 4 out of 5]

As an expose of what went on at Rocky Flats and is not going on with the cleanup even today, this book rocked. Many found it beautifully written, but I would just say it was well written. Clean, even sparkling in places, but nothing to knock your socks off. It's not Refuge, for instance.

The thing is, this book is supposed to be a bilateral exploration of secrets--cultural/national secrets + family secrets. While it was great on the first thread, the second thread lacked depth. Her father was an alcoholic, no one ever said anything even when he crashed the family pulling a horse trailer, and she was scared of him.

Hm. Sounds like 70% of American families in that time period. Which would work with the secrets theme, except she does no investigation of the way families kept secrets in American society (rather than just in her home). If anything, it's all because they're Norwegian, and Norwegians tough things out. But my family was Irish, the opposite of stoic...

And although she recounts her own denial, I'd like to have seen more discussion of denial in her own life. If this had been a novel, I would not have believed this woman would have gone to work at Rocky Flats.

I also did not have a visual on pretty much any of the characters. They FELT real, and that's the important part. Felt like individuals. But I never really saw them--what did they look like? And how scary was Dad--yes, he drove drunk, but I needed more frightening altercations to believe he was more than just irresponsible.

Still and all, this book was well worth reading, and I don't feel that way because I was part of the 1983 encirclement.

If you live downwind or downstream of Rocky Flats, or ever have, you'd better sit up and take note of what this book has to say. Move, if you can.

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kristen Iversen is a brave whistle blower, the Erin Brockovich of plutonium pollution. And she's a hell of a good writer, making the nonfiction account of government and corporate cover-up of Colorado’s Rocky Flats secret nuclear weapons plant activities a compelling, frightening, and personal story. She is a literary investigative reporter, weaving her family’s story with convincing scientific data that authorities ignore. She contrasts the mysterious cancer deaths of childhood friends and Rocky Flats workers with the brazen nonchalance of the Department of Energy, Dow Chemical, and Rockwell International. It’s a sad, disturbing tale of how citizens, who believe their government is honest and protective, are bamboozled and harmed. And the lies haven’t stopped. Jefferson County, the City of Arvada, and Candelas Development are building homes and a toll road through land that is radioactive. Alas, economic development and corporate greed trump the safety and health of Colorado residents.
Peggy Lawless, Co-founder
Colorado Art Ranch

[Bridget · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this book. It is so well written, and if you're looking for gripping non-fiction, it's the perfect choice. It's heartbreaking and enraging and it will have you talking the ears off anyone around you as you share what you learn in its pages.

The only reason I'm not giving it 5 stars is because I was really hoping for some infomation on current activism or steps you could take after reading. Essentially, it gets you furious and then gives you no outlet for what you can do about the things described in the book. I'm planning to go searching, as I'm sure there's SOMETHING I could do, maybe letter writing or petition signing or whatever, but at least it would be something.

Anyway, this is such an important read, particularly if you've ever lived in Colorado. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

[Cindy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've lived within 6 miles of Rocky Flats for 25 years, yet have never given it much thought, if any. Even after infertility struggles and watching my child go through cancer, the words "Rocky Flats" never occurred to me, even though there is zero history of lymphoma in our family. We'll never know the extent that the people and environment of Colorado have been (and are likely still being) damaged, all for the production of nuclear weapons that were meant to "protect" us but may have actually been the very things hurting us.

[Cymiki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fascinating story of Rocky Flats.....and the manufacture of plutonium triggers for many years in the name of national security. The story of the plant is interspersed with the author's personal story which offsets everyday life with something that is rather a horror. Interesting to see the recent article in the paper about the new housing development and residents' reaction to finding out the history of the Flats. This also marks my first completed nonfiction audiobook!

[Pamela · Rating 5 out of 5]

EVERYBODY living in Colorado should read this book. In fact anyone, anywhere, living near a nuclear plant or production facility, should read this book. I couldn't put it down, and finished wanting to DO SOMETHING. The story of Rocky Flats, not that far from where I live, is not finished. Thanks to the author for exposing facts the government has kept secret for too long.

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Production takes precedence over safety." Everyone in Colorado or near any other nuclear site needs to read this book. And any official who tries to discount the levels of plutonium still present in the areas around and within the Rocky Flats "National Wildlife Refuge" needs to have a special glass of water offered to them, Erin Brockovich style. A most distressing, but informative read.

[Anna Pesce · Rating 4 out of 5]

i am not a big nonfiction book reader especially during the semester, because i do enough reading for classes as is. but i’ve been wanting to read this book for a really long time, especially because i grew up like four-ish miles from rocky flats, and it did not at all disappoint. it was really, really interesting to get a look inside the plant and what actually was happening on the day to day, as well as what was covered up and downplayed, because obviously a LOT was covered up but i didn’t realize just how much was and how badly they’d run the plant in terms of radiation safety until reading this book. it’s always really interesting (in this case in a morbid way) to learn about big matters of national security and whatnot that sit literally in your backyard that are under such tight wraps. i also really liked how the author included her own story interwoven throughout, because it really and truly gives the story a sense of humanity and gives two very different lenses of looking at plant activity: an almost omnipotent lens built on testimonials and publications and court cases, and the lens of just regular people who happen to live right outside the rocky flats gates. very good read, thoroughly enjoyed.

[Nikki · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ok there are two different stories being told here so I will rate both of them.

The Rocky Flats side- Definitely well researched but reads like a Wikipedia article. There was a bit of an information overload (direct quote: I shake his warm, damp hand). Her writing this book seems like a pretty transparent attempt to make money because she was very disconnected from the ongoings at the plant.

The memoir- At least she seemed qualified to tell this part of the story, but essentially a poorly written version of every other memoir.

I learned a lot but hated every second of it.

[Dipali · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is amazing and so well-written! The juxtaposition of the author’s family life along with the history of Rocky Flats makes this a hard hitting yet deeply emotional account. I was in tears by the end of the book.

[Kristin Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fascinating book about an area and events “in my backyard”! Scary how much was covered up and how many people’s health were affected because of it!

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

More like 3.5--- wow, the stuff you learn in this book. I'm a native of Colorado - and just learned way more than I could imagine.