Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution

by Marilynne Robinson

Overview

At the time when Robinson wrote this book, the largest known source of radioactive contamination of the world's environment was a government-owned nuclear plant called Sellafield, not far from Wordsworth's cottage in the Lakes District; one child in sixty was dying from leukemia in the village closest to the plant. The central question of this eloquently impassioned book is: How can a country that we persist in calling a welfare state consciously risk the lives of its people for profit.

Mother Country is a 1989 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374526597
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	12/01/1999
Pages:	261
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.61(d)

About the Author

Marilynne Robinson is the author of Gilead, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award; Home (2008), winner of the Orange Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize; Lila (2014), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; and Jack (2020), a New York Times bestseller. Her first novel, Housekeeping (1980), won the PEN/Hemingway Award. Robinson’s nonfiction books include The Givenness of Things (2015), When I Was a Child I Read Books (2012), Absence of Mind (2010), The Death of Adam (1998), and Mother Country (1989). She is the recipient of a 2012 National Humanities Medal, awarded by President Barack Obama, for “her grace and intelligence in writing.” Robinson lives in California

Hometown:

Iowa City, Iowa

Date of Birth:

November 26, 1943

Place of Birth:

Sandpoint, Idaho

Education:

B.A., Brown University, 1966

Editorial Reviews

A (graceful) rambling account of the monstrous envenoming of the environment by the government-owned Sellafield plutonium reprocessing plant in the Lake District of England. The telling is interspersed with excursions into history, politics, sociology. No index. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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