Reviews with content warning for Miscarriage - Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

Reviews tagging 'Miscarriage'

Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives by Siddharth Kara

7 reviews

katharina90's review against another edition

challenging emotional informative reflective medium-paced

5.0

"Please tell the people in your country, a child in the Congo dies every day so that they can plug in their phones."

Whatever you think you know about mineral mining in the Congo, the reality is so much worse.

Siddharth Kara paints a devastating picture of the dystopian world we live in and the cruelty most of us in the Global North are complicit in every day.

"Nothing looks the same after a trip to the Congo. The world back home no longer makes sense. It is difficult to reconcile how it even inhabits the same planet. Neatly arranged mountains of vegetables at grocery stores seem vulgar. Bright lights and flushing toilets seem like sorcery. Clean air and water feel like a crime. The markers of wealth and consumption appear violent."

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sareidle's review

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dark informative sad slow-paced

3.75

An extremely important book that highlights the human cost of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The author did a pretty good job focusing on the Congolese and their experiences as artisanal miners. It was devastatingly sad to learn of the generational suffering in the country. My only critique is that the author needed to provide a better call to action towards the conclusion. Yes, it is important for the Congolese to tell their own stories, but what can the international community do to make that possible and improve their conditions in the meantime?

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lizziaha's review

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4.75

Crazy how so many of the world’s problems come back to capitalism. It’s a system that allows the privileged to exploit and mistreat their fellow humans while simultaneously eschewing any and all accountability for the exploitation and human rights violations that they have built their fortunes on.
I think that before reading this book, I wasn’t really sure how to engage with the human rights violations in the Congo because the way I had seen it explained made me think that the problem was farther down the chain, at a local level. But this is something that the book addresses—at every point in the supply chain, there is someone who profits from exploitation and at every point, they point the finger at someone else.
It was frankly horrifying to read about these people who risk their lives daily for a few dollars. It’s sickening to know that children die in tunnel collapses, that women grow sick from metal poisoning from tainted water, that men get shot by greedy entrepreneurs for trying to bypass the middleman. All so that I can sit here and type this on my rechargeable phone. It’s a tale as old as time and I’m so disgusted by it.
But I think that this is something that I have a moral obligation to witness. They say that history moves in circles, but that’s only possible because we don’t engage with it in a meaningful way.
This book makes this situation accessible—I felt like I got a broad view of the overarching system of exploitation and oppression, but also felt an emotional connection to the people whose individual stories were shared.

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