About the Author

Kristen Iversen grew up in Arvada, Colorado, near the Rocky Flats nuclear weaponry facility and received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Denver. She is head of the PhD program in Literary Nonfiction at the University of Cincinnati. During the summers, she serves on the faculty of the MFA Low-Residency Program at the University of New Orleans, held in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and in Edinburgh, Scotland. She is also the author of Molly Brown: Unraveling the Myth, winner of the Colorado Book Award for Biography and the Barbara Sudler Award for Nonfiction. Iversen has two sons and lives in Cincinnati. 

Reviews

Winner of the 2013 Colorado Book Award
Winner of the Reading the West Book Award in Nonfiction
A Mother Jones Best Book of 2012
A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012
An Atlantic Monthly Best Book about Justice

"Full Body Burden is one of the most important stories of the nuclear era--as personal and powerful as "Silkwood," told with the suspense and narrative drive of The Hot Zone. With unflinching honesty, Kristen Iverson has written an intimate and deeply human memoir that shows why we should all be concerned about nuclear safety, and the dangers of ignoring science in the name of national security. Rocky Flats needs to be part of the same nuclear discussion as Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima. So does Full Body Burden. It's an essential and unforgettable book that should be talked about in schools and book clubs, online and in the White House."
—Rebecca Skloot, author of The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
 
"What a surprise! You don't expect such (unobtrusively) beautiful writing in a book about nuclear weapons, nor such captivating storytelling. Plus the facts are solid and the science told in colloquial but never dumbed-down terms. If I could afford them, I'd want the movie rights. Having read scores of nuclear books, I venture a large claim: Kristin Iversen's Full Body Burden may be a classic of nuclear literature, filling a gap we didn't know existed among Hersey's Hiroshima, Burdick and Wheeler's Fail-Safe and Kohn's Who Killed Karen Silkwood?"
—Mark Hertsgaard, author of Nuclear Inc. and HOT

"This terrifyingly brilliant book--as perfectly crafted and meticulously assembled as the nuclear bomb triggers that lie at its core--is a savage indictment of the American strategic weapons industry, both haunting in its power, and yet wonderfully, charmingly human as a memoir of growing up in the Atomic Age."
—Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman and Atlantic

"Why didn't Poe or Hitchcock think of this? Full Body Burden has all the elements of a classic horror tale: the charming nuclear family cruising innocently above the undercurrents of nuclear nightmare. But it's true and all the more chilling. Kristen Iversen has lived this life and is an authority on the culture of secrecy that has prevented the nation from knowing the truth about radioactive contamination. This is a gripping and scary story."
—Bobbie Ann Mason, author of Shiloh and Other Stories and In Country 

"Kristen Iversen has written a hauntingly beautiful memoir that is also a devastating investigation into the human costs of building and living with the atomic bomb. Poignant and gracefully written, Iversen shows us what it meant to come of age next door to Rocky Flats--America’s plutonium bomb factory. The story is at once terrifying and outrageous."
—Kai Bird, co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer

"The fight over Rocky Flats was and is a paradigmatic American battle, of corporate and government power set against the bravery and anger of normal people. This is a powerful and beautiful account, of great use to all of us who will fight the battles that lie ahead."
—Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Eaarth

"Part memoir, part investigative journalism, Full Body Burden is a tale that will haunt your dreams. It's a story of secrecy, deceit, and betrayal set in the majestic high plains of Colorado. Kristen Iversen takes us behind her family's closed doors and beyond the security fences and the armed guards at Rocky Flats. She's as honest and restrained in her portrait of a family in crisis as she is in documenting the incomprehensible betrayal of citizens by their government, in exposing the harrowing disregard for public safety exhibited by the technocrats in charge of a top-secret nuclear weapons facility. For decades the question asked by residents living downwind of the plant was 'Would my government deliberately put my life and the lives of my children in danger?' The simple and irrefutable answer was 'Yes, it would . . . in a Colorado minute.'"
—John Dufresne, author of Louisiana Power & Light and Love Warps the Mind a Little
 
“This is a subject as grippingly immediate as today's headlines: While there is alarm about the small rise in radioactivity in the food chain, one reads in these pages about how a whole region lived in the steady contaminating effects of nuclear radiation. Kristen Iversen's prose is clean and clear and lovely, and her story is deeply involving and full of insight and knowledge; it begins in innocence, and moves through catastrophes; it is unflinching and brave, an expose about ignorance and denial and the cost of government excess, and an intensely personal portrait of a family. It ought to be required reading for every single legislator in this country.”
—Richard Bausch, author of Peace and Something Is Out There

Adult/High School-National security has always trumped transparency, but Iverson's well-researched, firsthand account of the effects of growing up a few miles from Rocky Flats near Denver is a bombshell. The author's parents chose the subdivision of Bridledale as the perfect place to raise their family as did many others in the rapidly growing Denver suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s. Most had no idea that plutonium triggers for nuclear bombs were being made just a few miles away. They preferred to believe that the plant was making household cleaners. Besides, the plant was a source of many high-paying jobs for the area. How could it be bad? As Iversen grew up, her family became more and more dysfunctional, which she weaves in, out, and around her discoveries of what was really going on at Rocky Flats. Think Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle (Scribner, 2005) with massive nuclear contamination and government secrecy. Ultimately, Rocky Flats was closed but the land is so contaminated that parts of it will remain unusable forever. Following in the tradition of Rachel Carson in her Silent Spring (Houghton, 1962), Iversen has bravely shown us things that we cannot ignore. Teens interested in environmental causes will be amazed at the enormity of this issue and its implications for the future.-Vicki Emery, Lake Braddock Secondary School, Fairfax County, VA (c) Copyright 2012. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.