Burke Book Club | Unmaking the Bomb
Date & Time
Thursday, February 18, 2027
6:45 p.m.
Doors open at 6:30 p.m.
This event is in the past.
Tickets
FREE and open to the public;
Registration required.
Join us for a relaxing evening with the Burke Book Club!
Each meeting, we’ll hear from Burke staff about a book they recommend. Feel free to read the book ahead of time, or join us to learn more about the selection.
Our February selection if Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility by Shannon Cram.
All book club titles are available for purchase in the Burke Store.
About Unmaking the Bomb: Environmental Cleanup and the Politics of Impossibility
What does it mean to reckon with a contaminated world? In Unmaking the Bomb, Shannon Cram considers the complex social politics of this question and the regulatory infrastructures designed to answer it. Blending history, ethnography, and memoir, she investigates remediation efforts at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, a former weapons complex in Washington State. Home to the majority of the nation's high-level nuclear waste and its largest environmental cleanup, Hanford is tasked with managing toxic materials that will long outlast the United States and its institutional capacities. Cram examines the embodied uncertainties and structural impossibilities integral to that endeavor. In particular, this lyrical book engages in a kind of narrative contamination, toggling back and forth between cleanup's administrative frames and the stories that overspill them. It spends time with the statistical people that inhabit cleanup's metrics and models and the nonstatistical people that live with their effects. And, in the process, it explores the uneven social relations that make toxicity a normative condition. (From University of California Press)
