Word: silkwoods
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...KILLED KAREN SILKWOOD? by Howard Kohn Summit; 462 pages...
...Some circumstantial evidence is very strong," said Thoreau, "as when you find a trout in the milk." In Who Killed Karen Silkwood? the odor of rotten fish is overpowering. Outside Oklahoma City, on a cold November evening in 1974, Silkwood drove along Highway 74 to meet a New York Times reporter. Her mission: to present evidence of safety violations at a Kerr-McGee nuclear processing plant. She never arrived. Her car swerved on the dry, straight road and plowed into a culvert. Almost immediately, according to Howard Kohn, company, state and federal officials began frenzied work, not to find...
Kohn, an editor of Rolling Stone, has spent the past six years studying the Silkwood story. He documents his claims of a vast cover-up that followed the accident and proves beyond any reasonable doubt that many people had reasons for wanting Silkwood silenced. The case was so volatile that a jury awarded the Silkwood family damages of $10.5 million. But should there be a charge of murder? Kohn cannot be sure. Ultimately, he fails to finger a culprit or offer a principal suspect. All he can do is present a detailed and disturbing mystery story...
Beyond Sophie? There is a film on the horizon about Karen Silkwood, an antinuclear activist who was mysteriously killed in an auto crash while working on an exposé in 1974. And afterward? It is a little startling to realize that Meryl Streep has appeared in only one Broadway show (Happy End in 1977). Another Broadway musical? A filmed musical? Some really alarming risk-taking on one of Joe Papp's stages? Say her friend Papp: "I'm convinced we haven't yet begun to see the richness of her talent." In fact, says this cheerfully biased stage director, "in films?...
Rashke sheds much new light on the Silkwood case, providing a clear and convincing agrement for further investigation. It is unfortunate that the forces the reader to wade through pages of extraneous detail and occasional highly technical descriptions. It is a tragedy that he gave the book the name he did. A hundred pages shorter with a title less bold sensational, his book might be read by those who mattered. As it is, it will probably be read only by those who are already converts to the Silkwood name...