
Cobalt Red
How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
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Narrated by:
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Peter Ganim
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By:
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Siddharth Kara
About this listen
Long-listed, New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year, 2023
Long-listed, New Yorker Best Books of the Year, 2023
This program includes an author's note read by the author.
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 audiobook, Kara argues that we must all care about what is happening in the Congo—because we are all implicated.
A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin’s Press.
©2023 Siddharth Kara (P)2023 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
2024, Pulitzer Prize - Finalist
2023, New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year: Long-listed
2023, New Yorker Best Books of the Year: Long-listed
"Cobalt Red is a riveting, eye-opening, terribly important book that sheds light on a vast ongoing catastrophe. Everyone who uses a smartphone, an electric vehicle, or anything else powered by rechargeable batteries needs to read what Siddharth Kara has uncovered."—Jon Krakauer, author of Into Thin Air
"Meticulously researched and brilliantly written by Siddharth Kara, Cobalt Red documents the frenzied scramble for cobalt and the exploitation of the poorest people in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.”—Baroness Arminka Helic, House of Lords, UK
“With extraordinary tenacity and compassion, Siddharth Kara evokes one of the most dramatic divides between wealth and poverty in the world today. His reporting on how the dangerous, ill-paid labor of Congo children provides a mineral essential to our cellphones will break your heart. I hope policy-makers on every continent will read this book.”—Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold's Ghost
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-
Story
It was supposed to be a moment of great optimism, a cause for jubilation. The Congo was at last being set free from Belgium—one of seventeen countries to gain independence in 1960 from ruling European powers. At the helm as prime minister was charismatic nationalist Patrice Lumumba. Just days after the handover, however, the Congo’s new army mutinied, Belgian forces intervened, and Lumumba turned to the United Nations for help in saving his newborn nation from what the press was already calling “the Congo crisis.”
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Somewhere between a bio and a hatchet job
- By Buretto on 12-27-23
By: Stuart A. Reid
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The War Below
- Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives
- By: Ernest Scheyder
- Narrated by: Matt Godfrey
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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The War Below reveals the explosive brawl among industry titans, conservationists, community groups, policymakers, and many others over whether the habitats of rare plants, sensitive ecosystems, Indigenous holy sites, and other places should be dug up for their riches.
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Misses its chance at greatness
- By B L on 09-16-24
By: Ernest Scheyder
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Race the Sands
- A Novel
- By: Sarah Beth Durst
- Narrated by: Emily Ellet
- Length: 15 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Life, death, and rebirth - in Becar, who you are in this life will determine your next life. Yet there is hope - you can change your destiny with the choices you make. But for the darkest individuals, there is no redemption: you come back as a kehok, a monster, and are doomed to be a kehok for the rest of time. Unless you can win the Races. After a celebrated career as an elite kehok rider, Tamra became a professional trainer. Then a tragic accident shattered her confidence, damaged her reputation, and left her nearly broke.
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A nice surprise
- By Ruthi on 07-17-20
By: Sarah Beth Durst
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The Fortunes of Africa
- A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor
- By: Martin Meredith
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 26 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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A sweeping history of the fortune seekers, adventurers, despots, and thieves who have ruthlessly endeavored to extract gold, diamonds, and other treasures from Africa and its people.
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VAST & WELL RESEARCHED
- By Odomite on 02-03-21
By: Martin Meredith
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White Malice
- The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa
- By: Susan Williams
- Narrated by: Chanté McCormick
- Length: 21 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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In White Malice, Susan Williams unearths the covert operations pursued by the CIA from Ghana to the Congo to the UN in an effort to frustrate and deny Africa’s new generation of nationalist leaders. This dramatically upends the conventional belief that the African nations failed to establish effective, democratic states on their own accord. As the old European powers moved out, the US moved in.
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A very good read.
- By Amazon Customer on 11-20-22
By: Susan Williams
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Volt Rush
- The Winners and Losers in the Race to Go Green
- By: Henry Sanderson
- Narrated by: Rory Barnett
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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In the twentieth century, wealth and power was dictated by access to oil. This century will have different kingmakers, perhaps different wars. We depend on a handful of metals and rare earths to power our phones and computers. Increasingly, we rely on them to power our cars and our homes. Whoever controls these finite commodities will become rich beyond imagining. Sanderson journeys to meet the characters, companies, and nations scrambling for the new resources.
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Can someone edit out all the inhales?
- By Amazon Customer on 11-26-22
By: Henry Sanderson
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Spies in the Congo
- America's Atomic Mission in World War II
- By: Susan Williams
- Narrated by: Justine Eyre
- Length: 9 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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The Shinkolobwe Mine in the Belgian Congo was described by a 1943 Manhattan Project intelligence report as the "most important deposit of uranium yet discovered in the world". So long as the United States remained in control of this mine and its supply, it had a world monopoly on the primary material needed to build an atomic bomb. The uranium from this mine was used to build the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.
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More little known history
- By Winifred Hinson on 08-24-16
By: Susan Williams
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Congo Stories
- Battling Five Centuries of Exploitation and Greed
- By: John Prendergast, Fidel Bafilemba, Ryan Gosling - photographer, and others
- Narrated by: John Prendergast, Channie Waites, Jerome Butler, and others
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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From the author of the New York Times best-selling and award-winning Not on Our Watch, John Prendergast co-writes a compelling book with Fidel Bafilemba—with stunning photographs by Ryan Gosling—revealing the way in which the people and resources of the Democratic Republic of Congo have been used throughout the last five centuries to build, develop, advance, and safeguard the United States and Europe. The book highlights the devastating price Congo has paid for that support.
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Brilliantly Reframes the Congo Narrative, Providing Hope
- By Theo Horesh on 12-01-21
By: John Prendergast, and others
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Diamonds, Gold, and War
- The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa
- By: Martin Meredith
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 19 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Southern Africa was once regarded as a worthless jumble of British colonies, Boer republics, and African chiefdoms, a troublesome region of little interest to the outside world. But then prospectors chanced upon the world’s richest deposits of diamonds and gold, setting off a titanic struggle between the British and the Boers for control of the land. The result was the costliest, bloodiest, and most humiliating war that Britain had waged in nearly a century, and the devastation of the Boer republics.
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Engrossing story on the evolution of the modern SA
- By Cary on 05-23-14
By: Martin Meredith
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Long Walk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela: Booktrack Edition
- By: Nelson Mandela, Sharon Gelman - contributor
- Narrated by: Michael Boatman
- Length: 27 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time. Long Walk to Freedom is his moving and exhilarating autobiography, destined to take its place among the finest memoirs of history's greatest figures. Here for the first time, Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela told the extraordinary story of his life - an epic of struggle, setback, renewed hope, and ultimate triumph.
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A Huge Distraction
- By Cathy Helding on 01-07-19
By: Nelson Mandela, and others
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How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
- By: Walter Rodney, Angela Y. Davis - foreword
- Narrated by: Mirron Willis
- Length: 13 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the leading thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution. In 1980, shortly after founding of the Working People's Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney would be assassinated. In his magnum opus, Rodney incisively argues that grasping "the great divergence" between the West and the rest can only be explained as the exploitation of the latter by the former. This meticulously researched analysis of the repercussions of European colonialism in Africa remains an indispensable study for grasping global inequality today.
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A Superb must read for everyone
- By Joy on 04-16-19
By: Walter Rodney, and others
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The Black Jacobins
- Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution
- By: C.L.R. James
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 14 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and, in the process, helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean.
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So you want a revolution?
- By Amazon Customer on 05-17-20
By: C.L.R. James
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What Really Happened in Congo
- The CIA, the Murder of Lumumba, and the Rise of Mobutu
- By: Stephen R. Weissman
- Narrated by: Kevin Stillwell
- Length: 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Newly available evidence shows that the CIA engaged in pervasive political meddling and paramilitary action in Congo during the 1960s - and that the local CIA station chief directly influenced the events that led to the death of Patrice Lumumba, the country's first democratically elected prime minister.
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Too Short
- By Sher from Provo on 04-23-17
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The Great Warming
- Climate Change and the Rise and Fall of Civilizations
- By: Brian Fagan
- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
- Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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The history of the Great Warming of a half millennium ago suggests that we may yet be underestimating the power of climate change to disrupt our lives todayand our vulnerability to drought, writes Fagan, is the silent elephant in the room.
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Good book but unpracticed, disjointed narration.
- By Paul on 09-12-10
By: Brian Fagan
What listeners say about Cobalt Red
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- d
- 07-02-24
Makes your perspective change
Makes you second guess every purchase I will make in the future. Has a lasting impression on me.
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1 person found this helpful
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- jason
- 04-23-23
Great book about an awful subject t
This is an eye opening and disheartening look at how greed and suppression of information lead to humans making victims of their fellows.
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- C. C. Kissinger
- 06-05-23
Best exposure of child labor I have ever read! Ex
Exposes role of China, but not the history of United States in the rape of the Congo.
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- Keisha Mac
- 10-21-23
Thank you for this
Ah, this book was informative, infuriating, thought provoking and a call to action that everyone consuming these products should understand the cost to the people in Africa.
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- Noel Armas
- 07-31-24
Eye Opening
What an eye opening experience. Great story line the way it was presented. It is a bit hard to get through as the stories are so morbid and there are so many. These kinds of issues should be exposed and perused. Recommend this to anyone who cares to really know where all our technologies really originate.
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- Brian Gyomory
- 10-26-24
Eye opening
This book is eye opening to the atrocities happening in the DRC. The chapters are wrong on the audio but presentation was good
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- M Wagner
- 02-05-23
How can we stop this atrocity?
How can we, the consumers of tech devices, stand up to the corporations that produce these devices, and demand that the Congalese Artisinal diggers of calbolt partake in the prosperity, welfare, and benefits?
Do we organize mass protests on behalf of the Congalese workers without voices?
Do we organize a mass letter writing campaign to the cooperate CEO's?
In mass do we unite and stop purchasing devices until concrete changes are made to benefit the Congaese workers?
How does the average citizens in the developed world realistically stop inadvertently exploiting the Congalese Artisinal worker through purchasing electronic devices?
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1 person found this helpful
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- Dan
- 02-06-23
A sad truth of our world today
I wish I could do more to her involved to help these poor people in the DRC. It's ridiculous that the people with the power and money are doing nothing to help these people.
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- flyingdutch
- 02-26-23
nice work and great narration
The author did reasonable work to put the story and word out with the new electric revolution and its negative impact on the lower end of the supply chain. the narration was spot on with a voice change for various characters and explicit emotions in the voice where needed.
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- Hardshell
- 02-19-23
Powerful expose
Eye opening expose of the cobalt extraction industry and the powerful interests who ignore the dismal plight of artisanal miners.
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