Please visit https://thebookvoice.com/podcasts/audiobook/1013/ to download full audiobooks of your choice for free.
Title: Yellow Dirt
Subtitle: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed
Author: Judy Pasternak
Narrator: Laural Merlington
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 8 mins
Language: English
Release date: 09-21-10
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Ratings: 4.5 of 5 out of 40 votes
Genres: History, 20th Century
Publisher's Summary:
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 Navajos fight for justice.
Editorial Reviews:
Yellow Dirt: An American Story of a Poisoned Land and a People Betrayed chronicles the 1940s discovery of uranium mines in Navajo territories and how the resulting radiation had long-lasting implications for generations to come.
A part of American history too few are aware of, the discovery of the mines was full of conflict from the start. Whereas many Navajo elders argued in favor of leaving the earth as they found it, younger members of the tribe were eager to use it as a way of making profit. Many worked in the mines for years, with their families living in their shadows, unknowingly exposing themselves to deadly levels of radiation. It wasnt until many years had passed, with the death rates from various cancers and the number of children born with birth defects on the rise, that the tribes begin to question just what they had been living and working with.
Laural Merlington is the perfect choice for this storys narration. Her voice is warm and deep, with a slight undefineable accent that lends credibility and makes the listener feel as if theyre getting the story direct from a member of the tribe. Her reading is spot-on, with incredible attention paid to the foreign and difficult Navajo language. Each word is spoken carefully, with well-thought out phrasing, making the words sound melodious and almost lyrical. Although the book is a work of nonfiction, Merlington still makes a concerted effort to give each player a unique voice; as the book features a cast of dozens, it helps to distinguish each player, and weave a story amid the many facts.
Whereas it would have been simpler to exclude the vernacular and terms in favor of their English counterparts, author Judy Pasternacks use of the Navajo language helps bolster the story and round it out with a richness that English wouldnt be able to provide.
