Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution

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Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution
First edition
AuthorMarilynne Robinson
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreNonfiction
PublisherFSG
Publication date
1989
Media typePrint (hardback & paperback)
Pages272
ISBN978-0-374-21361-9

Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution (1989) is a work of nonfiction by Marilynne Robinson that tells an alleged story of Sellafield, a government nuclear reprocessing plant located on the coast of the Irish Sea. The book claims that the closest village to Sellafield suffers from death and disease due to decades of waste and radiation from the plant. Mother Country was a National Book Award finalist for Nonfiction in 1989. While on sabbatical in England, Robinson's interest in the environmental ramifications of the plant began when she discovered a newspaper article detailing its hazards.[1][2]

Max Perutz, a British Nobel Prize-winning scientist, wrote a scathing review which attacked both the claimed facts and the methodologies used in assembling the arguments presented by Robinson.[3]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "Mother Country by Marilynne Robinson | Kirkus". kirkusreviews.com. Retrieved 2 June 2014.
  2. ^ Shannon L. Mariotti, Joseph H. Lane Jr. A Political Companion to Marilynne Robinson 0813167787- 2016 - This assumption pervades her first major nonfiction work —Mother Country. That work, which Robinson herself has identified as her most important book, is a polemic against the pollution of northwest England and western Scotland by the ...
  3. ^ Perutz, Max (2003). "Swords into Ploughshares". I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier. Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press. pp. 283–297. ISBN 0-87969-674-5.