Mother Country [Hardcover]

Marilynne Robinson (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1989

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.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Few Americans are aware that the world's largest commercial producer of plutonium is Great Britain, which also, according to the author, leads the world in environmental pollution. For 35 years, the British government has manufactured and reprocessed plutonium at Sellafield (formerly called Windscale) on the northwest coast of England. The plant accepts radioactive wastes from other countries, extracting usable materials and flushing the remainder into the Irish Sea or venting it through smokestacks into the air. As Windscale, the plant was the site of the most serious nuclear accident (1957) before Chernobyl. Reports of other accidents, a high incidence locally of childhood leukemia and contaminated area beaches have been closely monitored or denied by the government. In her pursuit of this story, Robinson ( Housekeeping ) becomes an incendiary: How, she asks, can a country ostensibly devoted to human welfare show such wanton disregard for the lives of its people. To answer the question, she delves into British economic and social history, examining the Poor Laws, Karl Marx, the Fabians and the welfare state. She draws a parallel between those who operate Sellafield and the industrialists, colonizers and slave traders of past centuries: their chief interest, she concludes in this convincing, explosive expose, is profit.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Robinson, whose first novel was the critically acclaimed Housekeeping ( LJ 12/1/80), here writes a nonfictional account of Sellafield, a governnment-owned plant in Northern England that, for 40 years, has been dumping radioactive residue into the Irish Sea, causing a major source of ground and water contamination and high cancer rates in the surrounding area. Robinson discovered this problem while on sabbatical in England a few years ago. She devotes half of her book to a discussion of Britain's industrial history--from the Poor Laws of the 14th century to the Official Secrets Act of the 20th--that shows a continual protection of this sort of conduct from close scrutiny. Robinson's loathing for British attitudes toward the powerless is consummate, and no American reading her book will ever feel the same about the mother country.-- Daniel La Rossa, Connetquot P.L., Bohemia, N.Y. Reviewers wanted for reference and pop ular books in medicine, science, and tech nology. Hot topics: childcare, aging, envi ronmentalism, radiation, popular use of microcomputers, and more. Those interest ed in writing critical, comparative reviews are invited to send a sample review to Judy Quinn, The Book Review.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 272 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (June 1, 1989)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374213615
• ISBN-13: 978-0374213619
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,277,674 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Marilynne Robinson is the author of the bestselling novels Home, Gilead (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), Housekeeping, and two books of nonfiction, Mother Country and The Death of Adam. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

38 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Meticulously crafted account of British plutonium pollution., April 13, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Mother Country (Hardcover)

In a life time of reading one may come across a book or two written with both great passion and linguistic craft. Marilynne Robinson's Mother Country is one such work. These two hundred thirty odd pages bristle and glisten with insight, logic, and control of the Mother tongue mustered in a searing indictment of the British state plutonium reprocessing business at Sellafield. The details and extent of Britain's mindless pollution of the natural environment will shock most readers. First, however, all but the Philistine will be stunned by Ms. Robinson's art, wisdom, depth of feeling, and mastery of English prose. Among a few books I unreservedly recommend

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Provocative, November 21, 2006

By 

P. Warren (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Mother Country (Paperback)

The book Mother Country is made up of two parts. The first is a history of the British welfare system. The second is about nuclear fuel reprocessing and plutonium production at Sellafield (Windscale). Both are interesting, but the author has made too little effort to address the relationship between the two. Nevertheless, there are sentences and paragraphs to be found in this book that are exquisitely written. Through the prism of Robinson's mind, some unpleasant realities are plucked out of the white background noise that culture treats as normalcy.

Robinson seeks the roots of a major environmental problem by exposing what she considers to be a long-standing pattern of hypocrisy, moral weakness, and lack of courage. _Mother Country_ is an indictment of English culture. As an American, I become nervous reading a condemnation of British attitudes toward the environment, written by another American. If we are lucky, someday Robinson will apply her pen to an analysis of how American culture has produced one of our own nuclear messes, such as Hanford, Washington.

The main focus of the book is the failure of British government to represent the public interest, but some of her harshest criticisms are directed at the media, where disinformation, combined with a general lack of information, are too often accepted on topics of critical importance.