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Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
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About This Book
The revelatory New York Times and Publishers Weekly bestseller, shortlisted for the Financial Times Best Business Book of the Year Award. An unflinching investigation reveals the human rights abuses behind the Congo's cobalt mining operation―and the moral implications that affect us all. Cobalt Red is the searing, first-ever exposé of the immense toll taken on the people and environment of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by cobalt mining, as told through the testimonies of the Congolese people themselves. Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara has traveled deep into cobalt territory to document the testimonies of the people living, working, and dying for cobalt. To uncover the truth about brutal mining practices, Kara investigated militia-controlled mining areas, traced the supply chain of child-mined cobalt from toxic pit to consumer-facing tech giants, and gathered shocking testimonies of people who endure immense suffering and even die mining cobalt. Cobalt is an essential component to every lithium-ion rechargeable battery made today, the batteries that power our smartphones, tablets, laptops, and electric vehicles. Roughly 75 percent of the world's supply of cobalt is mined in the Congo, often by peasants and children in sub-human conditions. Billions of people in the world cannot conduct their daily lives without participating in a human rights and environmental catastrophe in the Congo. In this stark and crucial book, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo―because we are all implicated.
Reviews
"Many of Kara's interviews are carried out under the gaze of armed guards and, although he describes in sharp detail the poverty and hazards faced by the miners, the limitations of his method are evident in places where the locals are flattened into brief figures of suffering ..."
"tour-de-force exposé ..."
"Extensively researched, this piercing narrative is muckraking journalism at its finest."
"Cobalt Red concludes that the 'exploitation of the poorest people of the Congo' is a 'moral reversion.' Amen."
"Cobalt Red is largely anecdotal by necessity, because very little hard data exist on the Congo cobalt supply chain."
"A horrifying yet necessary picture of exploitation and poverty in the Congo."
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