Navajo Afterglow

By Melvin Eisenstadt

Set in New Mexico, Navajo Afterglow is a novel about injustices done to Native Americans by the federal government. Two Navajo uranium miners, Sam and Johnny, contract lung cancer from working in the mines. They hire a lawyer to find out about compensation, and in the process discover a network of government conspiracy, from refusal to make the mines a safer place to work, to tests conducted on the miners to determine the effects of high levels of radiation. Set between 1950 and 1970, this story is based partly on fact, and includes an investigation that breaks through a classified information barrier, a romance, a scalping, a trial, and a fair amount of Navajo lore.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0887392717
• ISBN13: 9780887392719
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: Creative Arts Book Co
• Length: 254 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 1.0" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

Diligence and the clarity of hindsight.

The last few decades have borught to light a continuing litany of actions that, with hindsight, show the incredible myopia that confronts humanity at certain points in our history. The blinded view of the wider world, the ramifications of our actions, the paranoia and the rfixation that we and society all get caught up in. Our paranoia, or intensity, do not excuse us from acting within the context of our societies and our cultures.Navajo Afterglow is a compelling reminder of the brutal quality that faceless decisions can have of fellow members of humanity, regardless of how faceless they seem at the time. From Nazi Germany, the Kosovar Albanian concentration camps, lethal environmental contamination, to the lungs of uranium miners, humans have demonstrated a capacity to play god with others' lives. Every reminder, including the poingniant one in Navajo Afterglow, of the fundamental vulnerability, reliance, and interdependence of all of humanity upon itself and our environment should act as a clarion call for the spirit of society. I greatly enjoyed the Navajo Afterglow.