Here are 100 books that If You Poison Us fans have personally recommended if you like
If You Poison Us.
Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I retired in 2019 after 38 years of teaching journalism, environmental studies, and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. About half of my employment time was set aside for writing and editing as part of several endowed professorships I held sequentially between 1990 and 2018. After 2000, climate change (global warming) became my lead focus because of the urgency of the issue and the fact that it affects everyone on Earth. As of 2023, I have written and published 56 books, with about one-third of them on global warming. I have had an intense interest in weather and climate all my life.
Brugge., et al. rests its case on the personal lives of Navajos who became poisoned by the uranium that pervaded nearly the entire Navajo Nation from the 1940s until the mines were closed in the 1970s to about 2015.
Much of the editing was done by Navajos, which provides a clear and strong message describing how the many deaths from uranium poison have shredded the cultural fabric of Navajo life.
It is an intensely personal book that is very strong in its account of these effects on families, elders, and future generations.
Sixty years ago, the United States turned to the tiny atom to unleash the most destructive force known to mankind and bring an end to World War II. Ironically, the uranium used to create the most technologically advanced weapon ever invented came from the land of the most traditional indigenous people of North America, and was dug from the earth with picks and shovels...Lost in the history of this era is the story of the people - the Dine - who pulled uranium out of the ground by hand, who spoke and continue to speak an ancient tongue...By the thousands,…
I retired in 2019 after 38 years of teaching journalism, environmental studies, and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. About half of my employment time was set aside for writing and editing as part of several endowed professorships I held sequentially between 1990 and 2018. After 2000, climate change (global warming) became my lead focus because of the urgency of the issue and the fact that it affects everyone on Earth. As of 2023, I have written and published 56 books, with about one-third of them on global warming. I have had an intense interest in weather and climate all my life.
This book has worthwhile attributes, such as clear writing on the nature of uranium poisoning and its history, personal interviews, and vital coverage of local peoples’ reactions to damage done to their lands and their families, as well as their homelands by profit-mined mining companies.
Vasquez’s coverage centers on the Amazon with a focus on several extractive industries. This book stands alone in its coverage of resource extraction issues in the Amazon Valley because this area has so many other important issues to cover.
For decades, studies of oil-related conflicts have focused on the effects of natural resource mismanagement, resulting in great economic booms and busts or violence as rebels fight ruling governments over their regions' hydrocarbon resources. In Oil Sparks in the Amazon, Patricia I. Vasquez writes that while oil busts and civil wars are common, the tension over oil in the Amazon has played out differently, in a way inextricable from the region itself.
Oil disputes in the Amazon primarily involve local indigenous populations. These groups' social and cultural identities differ from the rest of the population and the diverse disputes over…
I retired in 2019 after 38 years of teaching journalism, environmental studies, and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. About half of my employment time was set aside for writing and editing as part of several endowed professorships I held sequentially between 1990 and 2018. After 2000, climate change (global warming) became my lead focus because of the urgency of the issue and the fact that it affects everyone on Earth. As of 2023, I have written and published 56 books, with about one-third of them on global warming. I have had an intense interest in weather and climate all my life.
Pasternak was one of several journalists who became immersed in the cause of assembling information on exposure of Navajos and other Native American peoples to lethal doses of uranium as a result of mining.
As a veteran who worked with the Los Angeles Times for 24 years, she played an important role in achieving compensation. Yellow Dirt is especially strong on ways in which uranium had pervaded the lives of the Navajo, from the clothes they wore to the food they ate, to the air they breathed.
This investigative feat tells the shocking, heartbreaking story of uranium mining on the Navajo reservation and its terrible legacy of sickness and government neglect, documenting one of the darker chapters in 20th century American history.
Now in paperback, the critically acclaimed Yellow Dirt, “will break your heart. An enormous achievement—literally, a piece of groundbreaking investigative journalism—illustrates exactly what reporting should do: Show us what we’ve become as a people, and sharpen our vision of who we, the people, ought to become” ( The Christian Science Monitor ).
From the 1930s to the 1960s, the United States knowingly used and discarded…
I retired in 2019 after 38 years of teaching journalism, environmental studies, and Native American Studies at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. About half of my employment time was set aside for writing and editing as part of several endowed professorships I held sequentially between 1990 and 2018. After 2000, climate change (global warming) became my lead focus because of the urgency of the issue and the fact that it affects everyone on Earth. As of 2023, I have written and published 56 books, with about one-third of them on global warming. I have had an intense interest in weather and climate all my life.
While several other books describe uranium’s effects on the Navajos and other Native American peoples from individual effects of exposure and death, Wastelanding is strongest in building a strong case that all of these individual efforts constitute a clear case that environmental racism, as well as colonization, and gender discrimination, combine with the United States’ hunger for uranium in a new atomic age to make victims of people who had lived in the areas for millennia while leaving the uranium in the ground, which is exactly where the people decided it should stay.
Wastelanding tells the history of the uranium industry on Navajo land in the U.S. Southwest, asking why certain landscapes and the peoples who inhabit them come to be targeted for disproportionate exposure to environmental harm. Uranium mines and mills on the Navajo Nation land have long supplied U.S. nuclear weapons and energy programs. By 1942, mines on the reservation were the main source of uranium for the top-secret Manhattan Project. Today, the Navajo Nation is home to more than a thousand abandoned uranium sites. Radiation-related diseases are endemic, claiming the health and lives of former miners and nonminers alike.
My passion for mining history was sparked when I lived in Fort Resolution, Northwest Territories. One of my students wanted to write a short essay on the Pine Point Mine, which he claimed had cheated the community by making so much money, providing few jobs, and leaving a big mess after closing. I offered to drive the student out to tour the abandoned mine and was blown away by the dozens of open pits and abandoned haul roads that had been carved out of the northern forest. From that day on, I was hooked on mining history, hungry to learn as much as possible about these abandoned places.
I have rarely encountered a book that captures the local impacts of mining as well as Lianne Leddy’s Serpent River Resurgence. I was impressed with how the author, a Serpent River First Nation member, used oral history and family stories to document how the uranium rush at Elliot Lake, Ontario, irrevocably altered the ability of Serpent River members to hunt, fish, and gather off the land.
To me, the book's real strength was the author’s refusal to depict her fellow community members as victims, highlighting their successful campaign for environmental cleanup of the toxic legacies that remained long after the uranium mines had closed.
Serpent River Resurgence tells the story of how the Serpent River Anishinaabek confronted the persistent forces of settler colonialism and the effects of uranium mining at Elliot Lake, Ontario. Drawing on extensive archival sources, oral histories, and newspaper articles, Lianne C. Leddy examines the environmental and political power relationships that affected her homeland in the Cold War period.
Focusing on Indigenous-settler relations, the environmental and health consequences of the uranium industry, and the importance of traditional uses of land and what happens when they are compromised, Serpent River Resurgence explores how settler colonialism and Anishinaabe resistance remained potent forces in…
When I covered the White House as a young reporter I was always more interested in understanding what was happening in the upstairs residence than in what briefings we were getting from the president’s advisers in the Roosevelt Room. I was raised with the understanding that in the end everyone is equal and that no one, no matter how powerful they are, gets out of the human experience. I think that’s what makes me interested in iconic women, from Elizabeth Taylor to Betty Ford. There’s nothing I like better than reading their letters and trying to understand what made them tick, and how they navigated their complicated and very public lives.
My friend Denise Kiernan shines a light on the thousands of women who worked on the Manhattan Project.
If you’ve seen Oppenheimer and you’re interested in the story behind the development of the atomic bomb, then this book will help you understand the hidden figures behind its creation. What I love the most about Denise’s writing is the way that she brings the mysterious origins of Oak Ridge, a Tennessee town created to house the people working on the bomb, to life.
At a time when the stakes couldn’t have been higher, women were at the center of the story.
The New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback—an incredible true story of the top-secret World War II town of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and the young women brought there unknowingly to help build the atomic bomb.
“The best kind of nonfiction: marvelously reported, fluidly written, and a remarkable story...As meticulous and brilliant as it is compulsively readable.” —Karen Abbott, author of Sin in the Second City
At the height of World War II, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was home to 75,000 residents, and consumed more electricity than New York City, yet it was shrouded in such secrecy that it did not…
I have worked and lived at sea for months at a time, and I have many memories of the sea, good and bad. I have lived through extreme Alaskan storms, fished in remote coves, and worked beyond exhaustion over and over. Working at sea taught me some important lessons about life and the possibility of sudden death. I experienced the romance of the sea from a young age, and it has inspired my writing.
A true story based on Israel’s most amazing espionage strike. This is as good as a first-rate espionage thriller with the added benefit of being non-fiction. The title was the first thing that grabbed my attention because it was not only an espionage thriller, but also a sea story. For me, it was a combination of the two greatest genres into a rare and excellent story.
I’ve spent decades showing people the beauty of space in my telescope, and volunteering for a college/park observatory, and NASA’s JPL Solar System Ambassador program here in Kentucky. My question – was it a waste of time? I should have been selling humanity on love and setting aside hatred. What is the point of dreaming of going to the stars if we are only going to take the same hatred with us. I write to cry my thoughts into words and attempt in some small part to bring hope that we can leave hatred behind, embrace diversity, and use the wonders of science to colonize our solar system and beyond.
My father and I were both speechless after reading this book. We were unable to put into words our rage at this nuclear energy cover-up. Instead of developing clean nuclear energy that could fuel the world, the world pursued nuclear energy that could destroy humanity. There is enough thorium to fuel the world and beyond for centuries. However, it cannot be used to make bombs. With the world in an energy crisis, we hoped writing letters to the Senator of Kentucky would give life to the idea of using thorium once again. Sadly, some only care about destroying cities. Everyone should read this book and learn about the alternative to uranium.
At the dawn of the atomic age, uranium and thorium were equally important as the elements of choice in researching nuclear energy - either one could have powered the world's reactors. But it was uranium that won out, and thorium, which is far cleaner, safer, and more abundant than uranium, was relegated to the dustbin of science. With it went the possibility of creating a low-risk nuclear energy source to power our planet. Now, as the world searches for cheap, non-carbon-emitting energy sources, thorium is reemerging as an overlooked solution. As one of the first energy experts to promote the…
I am a lifelong history lover. I was the kid who hung around the feet of the elders, listening to their stories and learning about the past. That led to a deep interest in tracing family history, which has been a passion since about the age of ten. I still can get lost for hours finding ancestors or reading about their lives. That interest led me to a double major in college and I earned a Bachelor of Arts in both history and English with a two-year degree in journalism. I live a short distance from Oklahoma and one of my favorite pastimes is to go to powwows whenever possible.
I have a passion for history and did one of my history thesis in college on white women and their Native American captives. In this story, there's a strong attraction, a commitment to abandon the life she knows by the heroine to embrace her lover's culture. Zeke's transformation back into Lone Eagle is one that really touched me emotionally.
The second book in Rosanne Bittner’s bold Savage Destiny series continues the love story of Zeke and Abbie Monroe. For the first five years of her marriage Abbie lives among the Cheyenne, learning their customs and beliefs and giving birth to a son who is as wild and free as his Native American family, and a daughter who will one day be forced to choose between her Indian and white blood. Through real historical events involving the government and Native Americans, Zeke and Abbie cling to one another through danger and torn loyalties. This story vividly depicts the “right” and…
In 1971, when I graduated from law school, I received a fellowship to help staff a Legal Aid office on the Rosebud Sioux Indian Reservation in South Dakota. I lived there for nearly four years, representing tribal members in tribal, state, and federal courts. I then worked for 45 years on the National Legal Staff of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). One of my major responsibilities was helping Indian tribes and their members protect and enforce their rights, and I filed numerous cases on their behalf. During that time, I taught Federal Indian Law for more than 20 years and also published The Rights of Indians and Tribes.
Vine Deloria, Jr., was one of the most influential Native American authors, and this is one of his most significant books. I was greatly moved by Mr. Deloria’s candid discussion of how white people screwed the Indians.
Mr. Deloria not only gives numerous illustrations of wrongdoing, but the book contains a section on how white people can try to make amends. Although this book is now 50 years old, it is a major contribution to American Indian literature. It helped shape my thinking about how our country has treated (and mistreated) Native Americans.
In his new preface to this paperback edition, the author observes, "The Indian world has changed so substantially since the first publication of this book that some things contained in it seem new again." Indeed, it seems that each generation of whites and Indians will have to read and reread Vine Deloria’s Manifesto for some time to come, before we absorb his special, ironic Indian point of view and what he tells us, with a great deal of humor, about U.S. race relations, federal bureaucracies, Christian churches, and social scientists. This book continues to be required reading for all Americans,…
