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Critical Praise

• The nature of a nuclear disaster&#151;in its psychic as well as biological and ecological dimensions&#151;makes its immensity almost impossible to convey. We can read measurements of radiation levels and stories from survivors at the site. But efforts to consider and convey wider reaches of the catastrophe, such as how it's affecting the integrity of our shared existence and the meanings we construct for our lives,are harder to come by. This makes Cecile Pineda's accomplishment all the more welcome. With <i>Devil's Tango</i> she has created a new and necessary genre, one which reflects both the fission at the core of the nuclear process and its fragmenting effects on our minds and lives. Using short, separate entries on a timeline covering the first year of the Fukushima Daiichi disaster's, she juxtaposes the personal and immediate with political commentary, corporate exposes, and scientific data. And by giving each entry, each experience, each reflection its due, she pieces them back together again. And it's the authenticity of these disparate pieces that makes them into a whole. In so doing, Pineda lets us glimpse how we too can bring a kind of wholeness,or healing, to our fractured world.

  — Joanna Macy, Eco-philosopher and author of Pass It On: Five Stories That Can Change the World (with Norbert Gahbler, Parallax Press, 2010)

• Pineda's cinematic memoir evokes layer on layer of what it means to be human as we face (and avoid) the magnitude of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis. We ride along, day by day, as her wide-ranging intellect struggles to come to grips with the planet-altering implications of worldwide nuclear technology. Pineda's theatrical genius converts this cerebral premise into kinetic, visceral experiences--doors spring open into inner and outer worlds full of motion, rhythm, shadow and light, warmth, touch, closeness. The vastness of galaxies and the particularity of our lives.

  Pineda's inner dialogue paints a fractured panorama of history, art, ideas—the fragile, ecstatic, peculiar works of humans. This is a book to savor slowly and/or stay up all night reading, a book to quote, share with friends, and tuck into a time capsule for future beings who wonder whatever happened here.

  — Barbara George, founder of Women's Energy Matters

• Cecile Pineda's astonishing anatomy of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster is an alarming cry from the heart that echoes the best work of Rachel Carson, Marilyn Robinson, and Helen Caldicott. This book is a revelation, and a searing denunciation of the worldwide nuclear energy industry. You will never get a better description of what actually happened (and is still going on) at Japan's Fukushima power plants after the March 11,2011 earthquake and tsunami.

  Pineda defies a world media blackout in her minutely detailed, day-by-day exposé of what amounts to humanity's death wish. It has taken great courage and immense research for the author to trace the fallout from our planet's most recent, and seminal, nuclear catastrophe.

  Devil's Tango is a call for us to wake up, inform ourselves, and resist. The author is a poet, an artist, and a disciplined investigative reporter who writes with the searing urgency of a mother desperate to save her own child. "Nuclear energy equals murder...." That is the message of this memoir written with boundless energy, even humor, and passionate resolve. Devil's Tango contains everything you always wanted to know about Fukushima, Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, and nuclear energy in general but were afraid to ask. It is a work of a conscience truly in touch with, and deeply concerned about, humanity.

  — John Nichols, author of The Sterile Cuckoo, The Milagro Beanfield War, A Fragile Beauty, Nirvana Blues, An American Child Supreme: The Education of a Liberation Ecologist, et al.

Reviews

• "Planetary catastrophe implicates all of us"

  OrionJanuary 2013

  Reviewed by Susanne Antonetta in Orion

  A central part of any thinking that aims at restoring environmental health is a recognition that were all in this together: any planetary catastrophe implicates all of us. One of the greatest virtues of Cecile Pineda's Devil's Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step may be, simply (or not so simply), the author's inability to let go of her personal involvement in the tsunami-driven accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear reactor in the Fukushima Prefecture of Japan in 2011, though she herself lives in California, and is no more or less affected by it than any American. A loose and associative memoir written in a series of vignettes, the book dates itself relentlessly from the Fukushima disaster — counting days, for example, as in a segment that begins, "Day 29 following the Fukushima Disaster, the MAU Company comes to San Francisco."

  Pineda, a playwright, is a very visual writer and a lyrical one, in love with what words can do. The 130 vignettes (and one warning) that make up this volume tango with the language in a bravura performance — "Light gives you this name, name of tree, name of branch, of leaf, of ripening fruit . . . clusters red to bursting, this nectar weeping sweetness through burst skins," she writes about a walk. She is also a narrator aware of the danger of language — of how much it can hide — and she constantly circles back to redefine the language we use for these disasters in the starkest way possible: "criticality. That means they were on the verge of meltdown."

  Devil's Tango works by building power within each episode; it is not a time- or narrative-driven book, though it contains chronology. Part of Pineda's poetic structure rests on quick, lightning strikes of hard truths, though at times, I wanted more information on her sources. Some are given in parentheses within the text, but many are not, and when I read that "fifteen in 100 Iraqi babies are born horrifically deformed" due to the use of depleted uranium, I wanted to be able to find the source of this fact immediately. Similarly, I wondered about relying on material as factually controversial as John D'Agata's About a Mountain for information on the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository. To Pineda's credit, though, the material for further reading at the end of the book is excellent.

  Pineda's more thoroughly backed information is thought-provoking and spun through a powerful imagination, such as the material on the basic structural problems of boiling-water reactors like the one at Fukushima; the epidemiological study on mortality increases in the U.S. following that nuclear accident, under the headline "Fukushima You"; and a lovely meditation on what might have happened if Augustin Mouchot, the inventor of a solar-powered steam engine in the late nineteenth century, had preceded James Watt, inventor of the widely used coal-powered one.

  Ultimately, though Devil's Tango is a book that generates its kinesthetic intensity out of research, it does not aim to be a work of research so much as a cride coeur, one woman's anguished reaction to a single accident that stands in for years and years of planetary abuse. Its purpose is that of the desert prophet, the one who comes to tell us who we are: "We are all Fukushima now." It is a resonant lesson.

• A morally powerful call for renewed activism

  San Antonio Express-NewsJune 22, 2012

  Special to the [San Antonio Express-News]

  Reviewed by ED CONROY

  In the vastly popular Japanese anime films of Hayao Miyazaki, tremendous ecological disasters befall the Earth and its peoples, but they are explored and resolved by heroic young women who have an inborn love for all of nature.

  Cecile Pineda may no longer be young, but she has done a heroic job writing a powerful narrative that explores, if not resolves, the issues stemming from the catastrophic meltdown and explosion of the reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant after a massive earthquake and tsunami on March 11, 2011.

  Pineda brings to this task a great love for nature, as well as theater, poetry and fiction, having lived as a director-playwright, performance artist and teacher in San Diego and the San Francisco Bay Area.

  In Devil's Tango, Pineda employs all her artistic gifts to awaken the reader's mind, heart and imagination to the drama of the disaster itself, conveying the pathos of the human tragedies that are its consequences, locally and globally.

  Pineda informs her readers in short, diary-like chapters that take us, day by day, through the aftermath of the disaster. She chronicles how its full extent gradually became public, despite resistance from TEPCO, the utility that allegedly failed to adequately protect and upgrade the massive diesel generators designed to keep the cores of the Fukushima GE Mark 1 reactors from melting down in the event of a mega-tsunami.

  Like a skilled reporter, Pineda skewers official public relations statements to reveal the tendency of TEPCO officials and many government officials — in both Japan and the United States — to downplay the impact of the Fukushima disaster.

  In contrast, she reminds us that in the first week after the meltdown, Fukushima "released more radioactive Cesium 37 than Chernobyl and all the bombs detonated during the years of atmospheric testing."

  She goes on to remind us that, like Chernobyl, we inevitably will reap a bitter harvest of radiation-induced human and animal deaths and birth defects as a result.

  Most significantly, though, Pineda uses the events at Fukushima and their response to critique the U.S. nuclear power industry, which currently has 23 aging GE Mark 1 boiling water reactors in service.

  She extends that criticism to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which she accuses of simply extending the lifespan of the country's 104 nuclear reactors rather than truly heightening their safety and solving the nuclear waste disposal problem.

  Pineda also makes bold to extend her meditation upon Fukushima to the little-known dangers of depleted uranium, or DU, weapons used by the United States in the first Gulf War, now associated by many medical experts with Gulf War Syndrome.

  She relates stories, as well, showing how people of color have paid a disproportionately heavy price as miners of uranium and workers in other places where their exposures to radioactivity were never properly monitored.

  This work succeeds on every level in alerting the reader to the fact that most of us know precious little about Fukushima.

  It cannot help but move even the coldest heart to feel for the Japanese people who, in their own ways, heroically struggle to survive in the wake of this disaster.

  Most of all, Devil's Tango is a morally powerful call for renewed activism for the eventual shutdown of the nuclear power industry as a whole, before another aging reactor located near a seismic fault line — say, in Indian Point, N.Y. — melts down and explodes.

• Remembering Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Forgetting Fuk

  Went 2 the Bridge (blog)Aug. 7, 2012

  Reviewed in [Went 2 the Bridge (blog)]

  Review by Lisa Savage

  I had a dream in early summer, one I suspect I'll always remember. I was the passenger in a car with an old high school friend at the wheel, which might explain why he was humping my leg and I was pushing him away in the opening scene. Next the car began to roll forward carelessly, and I perceived that we were at the edge of a grand canyon vista of reddish layers of earth, eroded, beautiful and vast. I called out in alarm and my classmate applied the brake; he wasn't much concerned, he had it under control. Moments later we were rolling again and I repeated the alarm, now scrambling my foot over to the brake pedal, my hand upon the wheel as the car teetered on the edge, dipping forward in its dance with gravity, flooding my view with menacing, beckoning beauty.

  We surpassed the tipping point, and the car began to fall. At the same instant I gave up the struggle and heard my inner voice say, without regret, I had a good life. The car fell gently, and I checked out before impact. A final scene consisted of meeting with bewildered elders in a place nearby; they weren't there to assign blame, but they genuinely wanted to know how I could have let it happen.

  In Devil's Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step Cecile Pineda has delivered a poetic, profound meditation on the slowly unfolding death of the natural world by man-made radiation. She's not the only one who sees it, but she's in a very small group of people currently alive on the planet who are able to face annihilation without blinking. Oprah will likely not be picking up her book, but I will be finding Pineda's novels (Face, The Love Queen of the Amazon, Frieze) to read as we coast downhill toward oblivion.

  When I remember Hiroshima (the first place destroyed with nuclear weapons 67 years ago yesterday) and Nagasaki (the second place destroyed by a different type of nuclear weapon 67 years ago) I can't help but continue to remember Fukushima. Here I think in terms of a table or chart juxtaposing what my fellow citizens think they know about these far off places with names difficult to pronounce, and what I think I know about places I visit only in my mind.

  Hiroshima

  What U.S. citizens "know" — Bombing it saved untold numbers of U.S. lives by making a ground invasion of Japan unnecessary

  What I "know" — Japan was already negotiating for surrender, and had long since lost the war; their economy was so crushed that they were building kamikaze planes without landing gear in order to save yen; President Truman said: "We have spent so much money building these weapons, we have to use them."

  Nagasaki

  What U.S. citizens "know" — The Japanese still didn't surrender after Hiroshima, so we had to show them we weren't kidding.

  What I "know" — We were in too much of a rush to allow three days for Japan to react to Hiroshima with unconditional surrender; we were testing a completely different type of nuclear weapon; we were making an example of Japan so the Russians, the Chinese, and anybody else would think twice before challenging our power to destroy.

  Fukushima

  What U.S. citizens "know" — The nuclear plant failure was caused by a tsunami, it contaminated a rural area right around the plant, and it's all under control now.

  What I "know" — Radiation alarms went off when the earthquake hit, hours before the tsunami; the Mark I Boiling Water Reactors at Fukushima have a design flaw that dooms them all to fail eventually due to containment vessels that grow brittle; General Electric made them and sold them to Japan following the Marshall Plan economic buildup of Japan as a de facto colony/aircraft carrier of the U.S.; TEPCO has successfully argued in court that it has no liability for the radiation released by Fukushima's venting; the radioactive plume continues to unfurl across the skies and in the oceans of the Northern Hemisphere; Reactor #4 is still in critical state and, if its fuel rods go, Earth could become uninhabitable by humans for 4.5 billion years or so; President Obama takes huge campaign contributions from the nuclear power industry, and continues to budget tax-funded expansion of both weapons and nuclear power production; the U.S. quietly stopped monitoring radiation levels on the West coast, and agreed not to ban any food from Japan, post-Fukishima; women and especially mothers and grandmothers in Japan hold daily protests against the use of nuclear power which are almost never reported in the mainstream press in the U.S.

  ---

  Pineda uses Fukushima as a jumping off point to make a convincing case that production of nuclear fuel for whatever purpose is effectively conducting war on the living inhabitants of the world. She acknowledges that a culture built on attending to the shiny surface of things is designed to overlook: The hundreds of thousands of nameless Russians who died burying Chernobyl. The fact that your government makes weapons out of depleted uranium, weapons that have been used in Iraq and Afghanistan and many other places, creating soil and dust that produces human fetuses so deformed they are not recognizably human. The fact the U.S. is full of G.E.-built Mark I Boiling Water Reactors, many sitting on top of seismic faults, others sitting right on the shoreline of the Pacific or Atlantic region of Earth's one ocean.

  The fact that, if you're my age, you can probably no longer count the people you've known who survived, or did not survive, cancer. Cause and effect break down when cause is an invisible, tasteless, odorless substance that takes longer to break down than does the human body.

  Pineda suggests reading Greg Palast's Vulture's Picnic for a more detailed examination of the central nuclear industry truth, "it turned out that fixing the regulators was cheaper than fixing the problem." In case you want to know why your government uses your own money to kill you for the profits of a few. Pineda herself is more interested in examining the details of who stops cooperating in the death-for-profit game. She quotes a farmer who helped bring a lawsuit to block yet another Japanese nuclear plant from starting up, Hatsumi Ishimaru: "Women are at the head of the anti-nuclear campaign because we value life more than economic gain."

  Official pronouncements coached by top dollar public relations firms can steer public perception, but they cannot change facts on the ground. Pineda writes:

   ...it's conceivable that in the larger scheme,
  Mother Earth may be the "decider"
  notwithstanding her failure to be recognized
  by the government — or any other government
  for that matter — with the exception of the
  government of Bolivia.

  If she has any hope left, it's riding on the rise of the global 99%. She quotes Takanobu Kobayashi, an activist who leads Japanese citizens in the relentless pursuit of life over death: "We do not trust the government anymore."

  ---

  Lisa is a book blogger and the Local Coordinator for CODEPINK in Maine.

• Death Dancing With Atomic Energy: Fukushima Hangs

  CounterpunchAug. 7, 2012

  Reviewed in [Counterpunch]

  Reviewed by Harvey Wasserman

  Our lives still hang by a "Devil's thread" at Fukushima.

  The molten cores at Units 1, 2 & 3 have threatened all life on Earth. The flood of liquid radiation has poisoned the Pacific. Fukushima's cesium and other airborne emissions have already dwarfed Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and all nuclear explosions including Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  Children throughout Japan carry radioactive burdens in their thyroids and throughout their bodies. Hot spots in Tokyo demand evacuation. Radioactive tuna has been caught off San Diego. Fallout carried across the Pacific may have caused spikes in cancer and infant mortality rates here in the United States.

  And yet, 16 months later, the worst may be yet to come. No matter where we are on this planet, our lives are still threatened every day by a Unit 4 fuel pool left hanging 100 feet in the air. At any moment, an earthquake we all know is coming could send that pool crashing to the ground.

  If that happens—and it could as you read this—the radiation spewed into the atmosphere could impact every living being on Earth. And that certainly includes you.

  Cecile Pineda lays it all out in her brilliant new DEVIL'S TANGO: HOW I LEARNED THE FUKUSHIMA STEP BY STEP (Wings Press).

  With poetic fury, Cecile rages in satanic detail about how Fukushima was built despite volumes of whistleblower testimony underscoring its fatal flaws. But after agreeing with proof that the GE designs were patently insane, NRC Chair Joseph Hendrie approved them anyway because doing otherwise would have killed the nuclear industry.

  There are 23 of these Mark I monsters in the US alone, far more worldwide. Pineda's passionate prose runs the gamut from detailed technical critiques to heart-wrenching dirges about the birth defects and malformations imposed on countless downwind victims.

  One reads with horror Cecile's descriptions of hundreds of horribly deformed children of Chernobyl. In three towns near Fukushima, nearly half the youngsters already suffer from low-level thyroid exposure.

  In Iraq and Bosnia, Pineda writes, vaporized depleted uranium shells have carpeted the countryside with radioactive powder. According to the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, children born at Falluja were eleven times as likely to suffer from "neural tube defects affecting the brain or lower extremities, with cardiac or skeletal abnormalities, or with cancers." As elsewhere in Iraq, and in Bosnia, premature births, spontaneous abortions and birth defects have become a plague.

  Some uranium by-products can kill for 4.5 billion years—a common estimate for the lifespan of the Earth itself. Pineda takes us on a tragic tour of other facilities with radioactive burdens, including nuclear waste dumps, weapons factories and power reactors.

  But nothing quite matches Fukushima and how it threatens us today. Astonishing as it may seem, the GE Mark I design includes waste storage pools perched 100 feet in the air. Around the world, thousands of tons of the most radioactive substances ever created are swung out of reactor cores and into these "swimming pools" to sit for months or years, suspended in air.

  The presumption has been that they would somehow be removed and shipped to a central repository. But nowhere has one been approved. Nor has anyone devised a safe way to get the rods there if one is.

  Experts like Robert Alvarez are begging that Fukushima's rods be removed to dry casks where they might be out of immediate harm's way.

  But at Unit 4, more than 1500 rods remain suspended in air. Called "a bathtub on the roof" by CNN anchor Jon King, the damaged pool teeters atop a building decimated by seismic shocks and at least one hydrogen explosion. The question is not if, but when it will come crashing down.

  Thus far, TEPCO has removed just two rods, and says it won't get the rest until late next year.

  Meanwhile, we are all hostage. DEVIL'S TANGO provides ample evidence that the Fukushima disaster was caused primarily by the earthquake of March 11, 2011. The tsunami that followed made things worse. But the atomic reactors there and around the world remain far more vulnerable to seismic shocks than their builders want us to know.

  This means Indian Point, New York; Diablo Canyon and San Onofre, California; in Virginia, Ohio, South Carolina and virtually everywhere else these reactors sit.

  All these reactors—including virtually every one in Japan—could be destroyed by shock waves like those that took down Fukushima.

  Cecile Pineda makes it passionately clear that our species has no more pressing priority than to get those fuel rods out of the Fukushima 4 pool and onto the ground before another earthquake does it for us.

  The only way out is a switch to Solartopia, to a world based on technologies that will end forever this death dance that is atomic energy.

  Meanwhile, as those rods still sway above Fukushima, the "Devil's Tango" has us right at the brink of a hellish world of radioactive hurt.

  ---

  Harvey Wasserman, a co-founder of Musicians United for Safe Energy, is editing the nukefree.org web site. He is the author of SOLARTOPIA! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030, is at [www.solartopia.org]. He can be reached at: Windhw@aol.com

• Devil's Tango shakes readers to the core

  La BlogaJune 12, 2012

  Reviewed by Michael Sedano

  Last month as I was enjoying Robert Arellano's Curse the Names, his doomsday novel informed by outlandishly consequential U.S. nuclear policies, I had simultaneously begun reading Nicole Pineda's creative nonfiction thriller, Devil's Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step.

  Pineda's doomsday take on global nuclear policies, the deception leading up to and growing out of the failure of GE's nuclear design at Fukushima, Japan, cast a harsh emotional glare on what should have been a bright, fun read about nuclear disaster.

  I had to stop. Not because I can't dance, but I was terrified to step outside and breathe the air. It's everywhere.

  Pineda scared the living caca out of me. To get around that, I adopt a critical perspective derived from Chapter 104's title, "A Little Bit Goes a Long Way..." Fear, like radiation, spreads. The main thing is, don't panic. That's a reading stance to adopt as one reads fact after fact Pineda's massive research cobbles together to terrify you.

  Just as Arellano's character goes crazy thinking about a nightmare scenario, Pineda's fact-driven scenarios spur a reader's imagination to nightmarish personal fears involving one's grandchildren and loved ones. A little bit of fear goes a long way toward coloring one's reading. For Devil's Tango, fear plays continuo behind the driving disharmonies of Pineda's composition.

  There's the photographer's story from Chernobyl. From the air, photos showed vast junkyards of radiation contaminated vehicles and other machinery. He couldn't take a photo at ground level because all that junk, and more, had been swallowed up into the flea market economy. Don't buy a desk or office chair within the million square miles of Belarus or Ukraine.

  There are the soldiers whom Russian leaders sacrificed. Sent them to pick up nuclear waste with their hands, wearing their Army green fatigues and comfortable leather boots. Pineda doesn't say if they spit-shined those boots.

  Three hundred forty thousand soldiers—all of them—died. No record remains of their names, who they were, where they were born or died, or of their cause of death. Pineda denies the unspoken premise, if we don't know their names, do they matter? QEPD, brothers and sisters. You did your duty. Russian army, U.S. Army, if you see a mushroom cloud on the horizon, you say "yes, sir!" put on your raincoat and march toward the smoke.

  If Chernobyl is the boogeyman of nuclear safety, what shall the world consider Fukushima? In the first week after the earthquake, Fukushima has released more radioactive cesium than Chernobyl and all the bombs detonated during the years of atmospheric testing. One hundred tons of fuel...have melted through containment and fallen into the basement of the reactor buildings—something TEPCO admitted only much later. Thousands of tons of radioactive water have been released...contaminating the water and sea life for all eternity or 4.5 billion years, whichever comes first. (84) Scary stuff.

  The scariest words Pineda writes are her allusions to all of us being wiped off the face of the earth. Relating a Siberian nuclear accident where years later, the ground still moves, the author observes, You know what this means. You know the fall-out plume will soon blanket the northern hemisphere. You know it will contaminate the food chain, on land, and on the sea. You know it will taint the soil, and the water, and the air you breathe. You know from now on, it will taint everything you drink and everything you eat. (6) The frightened rhetor relaxes, recognizing the fallacy begging the question. That's a relief.

  Not that we can do anything about it now, but the Tokyo Electric Power Company and General Electric company lied about the dangers, damages at Fukushima's four reactors. TEPCO was releasing volumes of radiation that would sweep the globe and where fallout settled, the land would be quarantined for half a million years. A TEPCO portavoz denied gas releases as they were happening. As a result of the leak that did not occur, region-grown produce is banned from entering gaijin lands. And all those rads went up-so-floatingly into the windstream.

  But according to TEPCO, matters are under control and the Japanese government plans on restarting the nation's other reactors in a skosh.

  According to GE, its reactor design—the same one used in numerous U.S. sites—is safe. Chapter 66, "Why every GE Mark I Boiling Water Reactor the World Over needs To Be Shut Down," counts 12 reactors with GE Mark II designs and 23 GE Mark I in the United States. But the problem goes beyond this one manufacturer to the paradigm of cooling systems.

  In nuclear energy generation, "cooling system" is an oxymoron. In California, Diablo Canyon bought Westinghouse and San Onofre, Combustion Engineering, Pressurized Water Reactors. And installed both on earthquake faults. San Onofre remains closed because officials have no idea how the dang thing works.

  A visit to Southern California Edison's San Onofre online plant tour doesn't inspire confidence. Clicking the worker safety drop-down menu brings up a page about trimming trees, reading meters, digging ditches, ordinary Cal-OSHA stuff. Nothing about nuclear safety here that SCE wants the public to know.

  By the way, don't blame the tsunami for the Fukushima meltdown. The GE reactor failed with the first earthquake. Aftershocks set matters up for everyone to blame mother nature. Bad management, bad engineering, bad timing, all went into the disaster. The tsunami wasn't bad luck or an act of the goddess some want you to believe. Citing an activist report gleaned from Freedom of Information Act-garnered documents, Pineda makes this clear, There's a reason why every nuclear expert on the planet wanted the world to hear this and that's because there is also the claim that Japan is only place such a massive tsunami could take place!

  Fear. Radiation. Nuclear riches in exchange for a dance with the devil. It can happen here. Devil's Tango draws in its readers with engaging writing and fascinating scenarios, but Pineda's leaving it to readers to draw their own conclusions, then buy in.

  Reading Devil's Tango benefits from keeping mindful of that chapter title about a little bit of fear going a long, long way. You probably can relax. After all, at book's (except for the notes and references) end, Pineda takes a step back from the brink and leaves a message for the future. If we didn't kill ourselves in our time, in your time, pull the plug on nuclear power.

  Wings Press, who publishes Manuel Ramos' must-read King of the Chicanos, publishes ebooks, too. Readers can order Cecile Pineda's Devil's Tango e-edition via Independent Publishers Group distribution in North America, and in Europe via Gazelle Book Services. Local booksellers can get the softcover volume, or sell you the ebook and you won't have to pay your pal a cut.

  At 223 pages, Devil's Tango makes a portable beach companion when Jaws gets too passé and you want a good jolt.

  Lacking an index, you'll find yourself dog-earing pages and leafing back and forth through its chapters looking for that reference to San Onofre, or that sit-in campaign by mothers in Tokyo, or any of the alarming facts Pineda weaves into her fearsome tale.

  ¿Sabes qué? I bet you can use your ebook reader and do word searches, access the internet and find those links to all those references Cecile Pineda's assembled on her seventeen page bibliography that sits there mutely on the printed page. Did I say the book needs an index?

• Fukushima Tour de Force: New Book Chronicles Nucle

  Huffington PostMay 22, 2012

  Special to the [Huffington Post]

  Reviewed by JEFF BIGGERS

  With Japan now only weeks into its temporary moratorium on nuclear power plants, a chillingly prescient chapter in Cecile Pineda's new tour de force, Devil's Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step, foretells the lasting impact of a "planetary catastrophe" in the time of powerful energy lobbies.

  Only days after his official tour of Fukushima and its triple nuclear meltdown in the late winter of 2011, Nuclear Regulatory Commission Chair Gregory Jaczko declared that the Fukushima Unit 1 nuclear reactor no longer had the capacity for offsite release of radiation, as his agency gave the green light for safety for Southern Company's "radical new nuclear plant design" slated for Georgia and South Carolina.

  In a provocative and carefully crafted piece of investigative reporting, Pineda captures the moment with the scathingly funny and deep insight that has marked her internationally acclaimed literary work: "If NRC chief, Gregory Jaczko, bears an uncanny resemblance to Humpty Dumpty, the similarity if unfortunate, is perhaps not inappropriate."

  Yesterday, in fact, the contentious Jaczko tendered his resignation, as Japanese opposition leader Mizuho Fukushima reminded the world that "the myth that 'nuclear is safe' has been shattered, and the majority of the public is now against the use of nuclear energy."

  That is, if the media and public are still paying attention to the lessons of what Pineda terms the Fukushima "tango."

  "It's not easy for you, or me, or anyone to pay attention to the consequences of the nuclear energy cycle," Pineda tells the reader in her foreword. "Why? Because you can't see radiation."

  Unfolding through a series of beguiling, passionate and often revelatory entries in a daily chronicle, at times with a flair for scintillating satire, Pineda's masterful framing of the urgency for readers to learn from the Japanese nuclear disaster and the machinations of its industry handlers makes Devil's Tango one of the most important and required reads this year. She writes:

  "You can't see fallout, you can't tell when you're eating strontium by the spoonful. It's invisible, you can't see it, feel it, touch it, hear it; you can taste it only in your mouth—when the fallout is particularly dense—as a metallic taste in your mouth, which any number of people reported this past year in places as far apart as Seattle and Arizona. In a world that enshrines surfaces, the industry thinks invisibility is a sure bet you won't ever find out."

  Considered one of the great innovators of American fiction and theatre, Pineda's eclectic treasury of literature has won numerous awards; Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee praised her 1985 novel on Brazil, Face, as an "extraordinary achievement." The New York Times selected her novel, The Love Queen of the Amazon, as a Notable Book of the Year in 1992. Her far-ranging work has explored gender issues, as well as stories in ancient India, Latin America, and contemporary agrarian societies in Japan.

  In Devil's Tango, Pineda brings together a refreshingly bold command of the facts and myths of the nuclear industry with her extraordinary prose to offer a rare look into many of the overlooked implications of the Fukushima tragedy. In the tradition of French author Andre Malraux's "Anti-Memoirs," Pineda "answers questions that memoirs do not pose and does not answer those they do pose, and also because one finds in it, often linked to tragedy, an irrefutable and gliding presence." That presence for Pineda is the haunting reality of nuclear energy revealed in Japan, but connected to our lives far across the ocean. She draws on her residency in Austria during the Chernobyl nuclear disaster; she examines scientific studies and government reports alongside absurdist theatre pieces.

  "At the heart of the nuclear nightmare," she writes, "is something no one wants to talk about: birth defects, a whitewash word for children born without the attributes we recognize as human."

  Turning her focus on all 104 nuclear plants in the U.S., Pineda's searing account ultimately asks the reader: "What is right? What right have we to do what is right? What right remains to us, knowing the little that we know?"

  In the end, with an unremittingly courageous if not prophetic voice, Pineda's day-to-day exposé transcends the ruts of most energy debates to raise these larger questions about one of the seminal crises of our times.

  "To say that corporate enterprise has abrogated your right to ask questions, to raise objections, or to expose malfeasance tells only half the story," she writes. "Corporations are not people. We are people, and until we learn to protest en masse, until we make it impossible for corporations to continue stripping the planet, they will hijack our earth, and make all living things expendable. That means you. That means us."

  ---

  Jeff Biggers is a regular book columnist for Huffington Post, and the author of several books, including Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland.

• From the Foreword by Jacqueline Cabasso

  Sixty-seven years into the nuclear age, we are all Fukushima now: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini, Three-Mile Island, Chernobyl, uranium mining, depleted uranium, cancers, leukemias, extreme birth defects, and the list goes on. How has the human race backed itself into this radioactive "End Game", and what can be done to keep the earth from becoming a designated exclusion zone? Told in the first person, Devil's Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step is an extraordinary and fearless slice through the meaning of lifeand deathfrom the very personal to the very global. The unfolding Fukushima nuclear disaster, exhaustively researched, serves as a day-to-day benchmark, calling into question the very future of our mother planet. Profound, quirky, laugh-out-loud funny at times, and utterly terrifying, the author challenges us to join her in waking ourselves out of denial, in learning to see the connections that link the tiniest fish scale and the smallest grain of sand with the corrupt juggernaut of the corporate, international terror state, and in acting on our consciences. It's up to us to save ourselves. Change, the author concludes, won't come from governments or the halls of power. It will come from the "99 percent" and from activists and local people around the world in a life-and-death, decades-long struggle for the sanctity of life. Devil's Tango tells an amazing story. Read it if you dare. Read it if you care.

  Jacqueline Cabasso, Executive Director, Western States Legal Foundation

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