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    Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed
    Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed
    Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed
    Audiobook10 hours

    Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed

    Written by Judy Pasternak

    Narrated by Laural Merlington

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    From the 1930s to the 1960s, the United States knowingly used and discarded an entire tribe of people. The Navajo 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 drank contaminated water from old pits, which had filled with rain. They built their houses out of chunks of yellowcake, they inhaled radioactive dust borne aloft from the waste piles the mining companies had left behind, and their children played in the unsealed mines themselves. Ten years after the mines closed, the cancer rate on the reservation shot up and the babies began to be born with crooked fingers that fused together into claws as they grew. Scientists filed complaints about the situation with the government but were told it was a mess "too expensive" to clean up.

    Few had heard this story until Judy Pasternak exposed it in a prizewinning Los Angeles Times series. Her work not only inspired this book, which is already a winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Award, it also galvanized both a congressman and a famous prosecutor to clean the sites and get reparations for the tribe. Yellow Dirt powerfully chronicles both the scandal of neglect and the Navajo's fight for justice.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateSep 21, 2010
    ISBN9781400189069
    Author

    Judy Pasternak

    Judy Pasternak is a writer who lives near Washington DC. She worked for the Los Angeles Times for 24 years, in Los Angeles, Chicago and Washington, tackling subjects as varied as al Qaeda's private airline, a band of right-wing bank robbers, backstage maneuvering at Dick Cheney's energy task force and the giant black hole at the center of the Milky Way. She has won numerous awards for environmental and investigative journalism. Previously, she worked at the Detroit Free Press, Baltimore News American and Hollywood (Fla.) Sun-Tattler. She is married, with one son.  

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    4.5/5

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    • 4/5
      This was a wonderfully written account of the disgusting history of uranium mining in the Navajo nation. A piece of American history we should all learn. Highly recommend!