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Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajos

Amazon.com Price:  $14.85 (as of 23/04/2019 13:45 PST- Details)

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Description

This investigative feat tells the shocking, heartbreaking story of uranium mining at the Navajo reservation and its terrible legacy of sickness and government neglect, documenting one of the crucial darker chapters in 20th century American history.

Now in paperback, the critically acclaimed Yellow Dirt, “will break your heart. A huge achievement—literally, a piece of groundbreaking investigative journalism—illustrates exactly what reporting must do: Show us what we’ve develop into as a people, and sharpen our vision of who we, the people, ought to develop into” ( The Christian Science Monitor ).

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the US knowingly used and discarded an entire tribe of people as the Navajos worked, unprotected, in the uranium mines that fueled the Manhattan Project and the Cold War. Long after these mines were abandoned, Navajos in all four corners of the Reservation (which borders Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) continued grazing their animals on sagebrush flats riddled with uranium that had been blasted from the ground. They built their houses out of chunks of uranium ore, inhaled radioactive dust borne aloft from the waste piles the mining companies had left at the back of, and their children played in the unsealed mines themselves. Ten years after the mines closed, the cancer rate at the reservation shot up and a few babies started to be born with crooked fingers that fused together into claws as they grew. Government scientists filed complaints about the situation with the government, but were told it was once a mess too expensive to clean up.

Judy Pasternak exposed this story in a prizewinning Los Angeles Times series. Her work galvanized both a congressman and a famous prosecutor to clean the sites and get reparations for the tribe. Yellow Dirt is her powerful chronicle of both the scandal of neglect and the Navajos’ fight for justice.

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