Mother Country
by Marilynne Robinson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Marilynne RobinsonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-12-01
ISBN: 0374526591
Number of pages: 261
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780374526597
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of Mother Country
Book Review: Provocative
Summary: 5 Stars
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.
Summary of Mother Country
In this powerful, eloquent, and elucidating essay, Marilynne Robinson has pinpointed exactly the motives and the mythology and the reality behind the destruction of our planet. The Sellafield nuclear reprocessing plant in Great Britain is a perfect metaphor for twentieth-century genocide. Not the small, insane eruptions of eradication that took place in Hitler's Germany, but rather that routine, day-to-day, thoroughly "democratic" envenomation of the planet by a current industrial magic (encouraged, or at least condoned, by almost everybody), which threatens to terminate everything on earth in the quite foreseeable future.Robinson's book is as powerful a contribution to the literature of revelation and protest as was that seminal photographic essay by W. Eugene and Aileen Smith on Minamata's disease fifteen years ago. It is as bloodcurdling as Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, as thought-provoking and prophetic as the best works of people like Barry Commoner and Loren Eiseley.
This is a work of great intelligence and fine investigative reporting. It is also a lucid interpretation of history, and very important in its discussions of the roots of current dilemmas. And lastly, Mother Country is courageous, and marvelous literature at its best.
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