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

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

by Kristen Iversen (Goodreads Author)

4.03 of 5 stars 4.03 · rating details · 668 ratings · 203 reviews

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--unkn...more 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.(less)

Hardcover, 416 pages

Published June 5th 2012 by Crown

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Sep 29, 2012 Moira Russell added it · review of another edition

Shelves: ebook, on-the-kindle, 2012-50-new-books-challenge

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...more

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Jul 09, 2012 John rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 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 again...more

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Apr 08, 2013 Max Carmichael rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 wan...more

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May 06, 2013 Becky Trombley rated it 4 of 5 stars

"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 t...more

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Mar 30, 2013 Margaret Sankey rated it 3 of 5 stars

Read for potential to be used in my new War and the Environment class, this is a memoir of growing up in the area around Denver in a town dominated by the Dow (then Rockwell)-operated plant that made plutonium triggers for nuclear weapons and which suffered several near catastrophic accidents which (barring some purely dumb luck like a firetruck knocking out the power lines) might have obliterated Denver. While I have read more focused historical studies, having this in the form of a memoir high...more

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Feb 16, 2013 Em rated it 5 of 5 stars

Ok, you know how in old movies the people smoke and drink constantly? You find yourself thinking, isn't it amazing what we didn't know back then? And also, aren't we lucky that we know better now?

In this true story, Kristen Iversen tells the story both of her childhood and of the Rocky Flats Nuclear weapons plant. I found myself again and again thinking, wait, this happened during my lifetime! This period that she's talking about during which plutonium was being released into streams, ground wa...more

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Jan 31, 2013 Everyday eBook rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Everyday by: John Abrahams

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,...more 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.

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Aug 22, 2012 Jonny99 rated it 3 of 5 stars

More about growing up than nuclear shadows. Very similar to Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting in that it essentially a personal memoir organized around a topic area which it revisits in the text from time to time. Iversen details her Colorado upbringing in an area dominated by a nuclear bomb factory. The "Shadow" of the subtitle is well-chosen in the sense that the installation always hovers in the background of her memories of family, horses and boys...more More about growing up than nuclear shadows. Very similar to Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting in that it essentially a personal memoir organized around a topic area which it revisits in the text from time to time. Iversen details her Colorado upbringing in an area dominated by a nuclear bomb factory. The "Shadow" of the subtitle is well-chosen in the sense that the installation always hovers in the background of her memories of family, horses and boys. She does a nice job of tracing her father's slow decent into alcoholism and her bored housewife mother's co-dependent decent into Valium and social isolation.

However, admiring the story-telling doesn't make it interesting and many of the details hold emotional weight far more for the story-teller than the audience. We hear about stocking ruined by wading through plant run-off, blouses purchased to make her more girly and other trivia from an ex-urban 1970's-1980's upbringing. Maybe female readers of a certain age will find the walk down memory lane refreshing. The general readership will be listening politely waiting for talk to turn back to the Atomic Energy Council's nuclear factory.

And occasionally, we do hear, sometimes with detail, about the operations of the plant and its plutonium-fueled impact on the surrounding towns. Like other venues, such as movie "The Atomic Cafe", these sections rely for their entertainment value to some degree on descriptions of the naivety of plant officials of the time such as housing spent plutonium (lethal dose 1 micro-gram)in metal barrels exposed to the elements (such as rust-inducing rainwater). Occasionally, we get a glimpse of Michael Moore-style outrage such as when a plant official describes the plutonium released by 2 fires as "no more than a pinch"; with 1-micro-gram as a deadly amount, a pinch could take out an entire Denver suburb. Too often however, the plant is just background for discussion of her school crushes.

Iversen's writing style is introspective occasionally feeling like a movie shot in too tight a close-up. However, she does some supple storytelling particularly around her father's alcoholism which is rarely stated directly but implied through a series of vignettes played out in drunk driving crashes, secret visits (with 4 kids in the car) visits to the liquor store and a stint in prison that the family, somewhat comically, never talks about.

In short, if you enjoy first person narratives about coming of age, you may find this interesting but those more interested in cold war-icana should look elsewhere.

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Aug 07, 2012 Katherine rated it 4 of 5 stars

Kristen Iversen’s story of growing up in the shadow of the Rocky Flats, Colorado nuclear facility is interspersed with an indictment of the coverup that ensued as the radiation from the facility slowly poisoned the environment around it.

This is actually two books in one, the story of the author growing up in a severely dysfunctional family where no one mentioned daddy’s drinking and the story of the systematic and cold-blooded corporate irresponsibility of Dow Chemicals (the people who brought u...more Kristen Iversen’s story of growing up in the shadow of the Rocky Flats, Colorado nuclear facility is interspersed with an indictment of the coverup that ensued as the radiation from the facility slowly poisoned the environment around it.

This is actually two books in one, the story of the author growing up in a severely dysfunctional family where no one mentioned daddy’s drinking and the story of the systematic and cold-blooded corporate irresponsibility of Dow Chemicals (the people who brought us the Bhopal Disaster) in the way they operated the secret Rocky Flats nuclear facility. That latter story is fascinating and the account of the Mother’s Day fire is chilling in the same way accounts of the meltdown at Chernobyl are chilling. (And while it’s a different kind of warning altogether, the whistle blowing that went on in futility reminds us a bit of Richard Clarke’s unheeded warnings in the days before 9/11.)

This citizen activist part of the story is Silkwood meets Erin Brockovitch meets Love Canal meets A Civil Action, The investigation of the cover up will outrage the reader and using Iversen’s memoir to frame the story gives the issue a human face.

Unfortunately, we are ultimately a lot less interested in Kristen’s story of dysfunctional parents who don’t discuss unpleasant matters—it’s a Norwegian thing—than we are the various “incidents” at the Rocky Flats plant, a supposedly super-secret facility that built nuclear triggers and employed half the town. Kristen’s account of the 1969 “Blue Flash” incident is absolutely chilling and the depth of denial from her parents is stunning. But that’s nothing next to the levels of duplicity involved in keeping the nuclear secrets.

There are no easy answers here, and no happy endings. There is, however, hope. There are, however, some heroes, including Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, a feisty activist nun, a horse breeder whose animals are dying and a housewife who simply doesn’t want her kids to drink water from a reservoir polluted with plutonium.

What happened at Rocky Flats was a disgrace and while officials denied there was any problem (as at Love Canal). children died of cancer and livestock sickened and rabbits mutated. The accounts of both the 1957 and 1969 fires are harrowing and exciting, and remind us of other nuclear disasters—from the tsunami-ravaged plants in Japan to the meltdown in Chernobyl.

Juxtaposed against this backdrop is the author’s personal life, which is often mundane but is also punctuated with incidents like the time her hard-drinking father nearly killed her, and a hilarious account of going to a “haunted house” with her friend Tina. These incidents serve to remind us that the story of Rocky Flats is the story of American families put at risk by secrets and lies.

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Aug 06, 2012 Cheryl rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult-nonfiction, biography-memoir, colorado-connections

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 alcoholis...more

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Jul 15, 2012 Susan rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arc-edition, personal_memoir_biography, social-issues-or-commentary

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...more

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Jul 08, 2012 Christina rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, nonfiction, memoir

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 i...more 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.(less)

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Jun 25, 2012 Kathleen Hagen added it · review of another edition

Full Body Burden: Growing up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, by Kristin Iverson, Narrated by Kirsten Potter with the prologue narrated by Kristin Iverson herself, produced by Random House Audio, downloaded from audible.com.

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 childhoo...more Full Body Burden: Growing up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats, by Kristin Iverson, Narrated by Kirsten Potter with the prologue narrated by Kristin Iverson herself, produced by Random House Audio, downloaded from audible.com.

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- 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, the best wages around, and a denial of the safety risks. This book ends with a poem about nuclear bombs by Allen Ginsburg. Very good and very hard to read.
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Jun 20, 2012 Al rated it 4 of 5 stars

I gave this book an extra star because the subject matter is so important for us to understand. She tells a very compelling story that you are drawn into, and time is giving more and more credibility to the claims being made.

She and I grew up at the same time, and in the same geographic spot on Earth. I was raised just one major city to the west, Salt Lake. I remember hearing about Rocky Flats in the news, but I didn't realize how dangerous this nuclear threat was to those in the Denver area. I...more

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Jun 11, 2012 Bonnie Brody rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 int...more 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'.
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Jun 06, 2012 Nancy Kennedy rated it 5 of 5 stars

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...more 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.
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May 06, 2012 Peggy rated it 5 of 5 stars

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 Rock...more

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May 04, 2013 Cindy rated it 4 of 5 stars

Iversen states that in writing her memoir she had to write about her father’s alcoholism and Rocky Flats. This memoir blends together the thorough research on the history and impact of the nuclear weapons production facility with eloquent descriptions of the life Kristen had growing up. She weaves the lives of those working and living around the plant (including herself) along with her life from childhood through today in a way that makes one complete story, that has the feel of two stories. I n...more

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Nov 12, 2012 Tom rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, biography, history, local-library, politics, science, non-fiction

A great story/account of a place that many around my age (and certainly younger) had no idea even existed. It is truly scary to see the cover up and lies perpetuated by our government in the name of national security, all the while having seemingly no regard for human life. And this cuts across all political sides. This was an engaging, true and at times surreal story of Rocky Flats and the devastation that did occur, almost occurred and still does occur in some families even today. Rocky Flats...more

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Jul 15, 2012 Peg rated it 4 of 5 stars

Full Body Burden: Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats by Kristen Iversen. I was given an Uncorrected Proof of this book for review. Thank you.

Full Body Burden means the body has been exposed to its maximum amount of plutonium. Rocky Flats is the name of a plant making plutonium 'triggers' located in the Denver/Arvada, Colorado, area. This is a well-researched, fast-paced book alternating between the scary activities occurring at Rocky Flats and the author's memoir during the time she...more

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Jul 09, 2012 Rachel rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012, non-fiction, memoir

This book had quite a bit of technical and scientific information in it, but it's written with a narrative that makes it easily readable. I didn't always understand the nitty gritty of the science that Iversen was writing about but I could understand the points she was trying to make anyway. I don't have much of a head for science so that is probably mostly my fault anyway.

I liked how she alternated the story between what was happening at Rocky Flats and what was happening in her own personal li...more

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Feb 13, 2013 Holly rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013-reads, audio

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 appropri...more

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Apr 26, 2012 JDK1962 rated it 4 of 5 stars

(Disclaimer: 20+ year resident of Boulder, Colorado, just up the road from Rocky Flats.)

I'm conflicted about this book: I enjoyed reading it very much, but the Rocky Flats story, with which I was unfamiliar, was appalling on pretty much every level. While I can certainly understand taking national defense seriously, I cannot understand the idea that national defense, during a time of peace, can be used as an excuse for slipshod production practices and--not to put too fine a point on it--to inad...more

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Mar 04, 2012 Seth Morris rated it 3 of 5 stars

The sub-title - Growing Up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats - does a great job describing the book, but leaves out the scary intersection where commerce, paranoia, and life meet. The rise of communism after WWII "forced" the powers to be to maintain a healthy stock our nuclear arms at our disposal. The kid with the most toys wins. The Rocky Flats becomes a major manufacturer of an integral piece of the U.S.'s nuclear warheads. The author tells her story, growing-up in spitting distance of th...more

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Jul 13, 2012 Roger Briggs rated it 5 of 5 stars

I finished Full Body Burden and like the memoir style of telling this fascinating story of Rocky Flats. I started working for DOE Hanford in ’92 as a certified industrial hygienist involved in worker safety and health. I retired after 18 years in 2010 and now live in Sequim. I am glad to read now about Rocky Flats which I had heard so much about but knew little of the details of what happened leading up to the raid on the plant by the FBI. There was so much mistrust among workers and management...more

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Aug 08, 2012 Laura rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-to-read

*ARC Uncorrected Proof Won Through Goodreads*

I really enjoyed this book. While I wasn't fully sure what I was getting when I entered this drawing, I was pleasantly surprised to not only get a book I enjoyed, but also to learn a great deal about a part of this nation's history I previously knew very little about. Kristen Iverson weaves together her personal story with the story of Rocky Flats, a plutonium processing plant near Denver, CO. Iverson spent 12 years researching the plant (as well as l...more

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Dec 03, 2012 Linda rated it 5 of 5 stars

Ok, so I really can't say that I love this book (5 stars) but I grew up just a few miles south of and a few years after Kristin (still in Arvada) so feel a close affinity to the story. I'm about 1/3 of the way through the book and have spent a lot of time doing silent screams and thinking "Oh My God" in horror. I can't read it late at night or i'll be up half the night thinking about it (and the kid who grew up a block from me who got testicular cancer, and the families i knew, but lost track of...more

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May 04, 2013 Linconter rated it 5 of 5 stars

This is an absolutely chilling read for someone living in Colorado or anywhere near a nuclear production facility. If we cannot trust what the government agencies say about the plutonium and other radioactive matter levels around Rocky Flats (past AND present) - and apparently we definitely canNOT - how does any governmental unit expect us to trust it about the newest biohazard: fracking? And a caution to each and every citizen of Colorado - don't think of going hiking on the "Nature Preserve" t...more

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Jul 23, 2012 Anne rated it 3 of 5 stars

Love of money is the root of all evil and we see it so clearly in this book - greedy, secretive Dow Chemical polluted these families with plutonium waste and most people didn't even know it was a nuclear processing facility. Once people caught on, thirty years later, Dow Chemical repeatedly denied that there was anything radioactive leaking in to the water and the air and it is very clear that it was.

Spoiler alert (not really all that surprising, sadly) - no one was held accountable for the disa...more

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Mar 29, 2013 Tracy rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Alarming. A few quotes from the book,

"Dr Helen Caldicott is even more direct. A doctor serving as president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, she calls Rocky Flats a "death factory." "We're killing ourselves," she says, "to make bombs to kill ourselves better."

"The problem was the blanket secrecy, starting in Washington and trickling down to the contractor at the site. Any scrutiny of the plant's activity was viewed with suspicion, and it became convenient to invoke the need for secrecy...more

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About Kristen Iversen

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...more

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