“I thought that the ground in the Congo took its vermillion hue from the copper in the dirt, but now I cannot help but wonder whether the earth here is red because of all the blood that has spilled upon it.”

This is a phenomenal non-fiction read exposing the ramifications of our device-driven society.

Activist and researcher Siddharth Kara informs us of the horrifying conditions cobalt miners in the Congo experience in an effort to keep up with the increasing world demand for cobalt. He claims that “the blood of the Congo powers our lives” and provides the unvarnished truth, alarming proof that many powerful companies are desperate to hide.

Cobalt is an essential ingredient of the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power our smartphones, laptops and electric cars. It’s a rare, silvery metal that is also used in many of our low-carbon innovations crucial to achieving our climate sustainability goals. It’s mined in the Katanga region, a part of the Congo that has more reserves than the rest of the world combined.

There is a vast disparity between the companies that sell products containing cobalt and the people who dig it out of the ground. I was horrified to read about the children and women who hand mine this metal for a mere dollar a day. They fear tunnel collapsing, working in radioactive water, and speaking out against their meagre wages.

We can’t just remove cobalt from our rechargeable batteries. It contributes to the batteries holding more charge and operating safely for longer time periods. If we remove it, we have to plug in our devices more often and risk batteries catching fire.

To put it in perspective, the battery packs in our electric cars take up to ten kilograms of cobalt - that’s more than one thousand times the amount needed in our smartphone batteries. Did you gasp?

Need another clear picture? Did you know that during the pandemic there was increased pressure put on Congolese cobalt extraction? Billions of us relied, more than ever, on our rechargeable batteries to continue remote working and schooling. It put pressure on the artisanal miners and many more children had to join the mining workforce to keep up with the demand and help their families survive. COVID protocols? What protocols? Non-existent. If they didn’t contract the virus and share it with their family causing death, they still stopped their education to provide for US.

While I was expecting more of a human interest story and I felt bogged down with the amount of information presented, I did realize the importance of this book. We ALL need to care about what’s happening here because we are all implicated. We are ALL powering the digital revolution. ALL OF US.

I’m struggling with the author’s final thoughts: “Lasting change is best achieved when the voices of those who are exploited are able to speak for themselves and are heard when they do so.” I do agree with his plea for accountability, rather than “zero-tolerance policies and hollow PR” focusing on human rights violations. One of his solutions may seem unattainable - “treat the artisanal miners as equal employees to the people who work at corporate headquarters.”

I may not have come away with a plan or many thoughts on how to help this crisis, but I was emotionally affected and was educated and this is what will fuel my future actions.

I’m grateful for the invitation to read this powerful book. I was gifted it by St. Martin’s Press and NetGalley and was under no obligation to provide a review.

Shocking. In the West, we're somewhat aware of the horrible conditions African diamond miners face. We've at least heard of this, including the trivia fact of the deepest mine in the world being a diamond mine somewhere on the continent there. And despite diamonds' wide spread use (well beyond the bling so many associate with them, by some stats that is actually one of the more *rare* uses for them, apparently). many don't really think of this too much.

But our cellphones? Our tablets? Our state of the art electric vehicles? Our "commitment to zero carbon by [insert year]" climate activism? Our ESG corporate policies?

All of these are impacted by the travails Kara uncovers in this biting expose of the Congolese Cobalt mining operations and specifically just how horrid and unsafe the conditions therein are, including the rampant and untracked use of child labor. Here, Kara takes us on an undercover journey from one of the of the region to the other, while protecting his sources as much as possible. It is an alarming look, one that the heads and other decision makers in many of the world's largest corporations and manufacturers need to read and examine the issues it raises in further detail based on this reporting. Even if Elon Musk (Tesla), Akio Toyoda (Toyota), Mary Barra (GM), and Oliver Blume (Volkswagen) won't look into this, perhaps global banking, as part of its own ESG and Zero Carbon initiatives, could look into it from their end and begin to influence the car manufacturers from that side.

In a book full of unimaginable pain and sorrow, a few tales stick out. One of them in particular is that of a man who was injured in the mine, and thus his teenage son was forced to work in the mine for the family's subsistence. Just a week before this father could go back to work, word came from the mine of a collapse. His son died in that collapse and the body remains buried within the mine. Prepare yourself, reader. As illuminating as this text is, stories at least that bad pepper this text like sand on a beach.

The only reason for the single star deduction? Possibly due to the text being primarily Kara's own investigations, the bibliography here is quite scant indeed, clocking in at barely 8% of the overall text when 20-30% is much more common in my experience with other nonfiction advance reader copies.

Overall this is absolutely a book that needs to be read as widely as possible, and one that needs as much attention brought to its issues as possible. Very much recommended.

Cobalt Red is an interesting but challenging read.

Content is profoundly bleak. Siddharth Kara takes us through an industry responsible for horrifying human rights abuses, including severe long-term health repercussions, child labor, and deaths for which no one is held responsible.

We also see the absolute destruction of once-thriving environments.

All that was, of course, depressing and difficult to read, but it’s also important to know.

I struggled with the density of information. We’re given an immense amount of detail on what cobalt is, how it’s manufactured for use, and what it’s used for. We learn about the mining process from start to finish in several mines, and we learn about the companies’ roles in the processing. I understand why a lot of this was necessary, but it was a bit much for me personally. I found myself tuning out, my mind drifting away as I read.

I expected more of a human interest story. While we do have that type of content, it’s dispersed throughout and within a whole lot of industry, economic, and political information.

I’m glad I read this book, though it left me feeling sad and helpless because none of this can be fixed unless the Congo’s corrupt government steps in to help its people, and the companies profiting opt to actually care about the people and the land.

In Western society, we're so accustomed to having high tech devices like smartphones and laptops connecting us to the world that we don't even consider that these devices also connect us to environmental degradation, political corruption, child workers, and other horrific labor practices. But with Cobalt Red, author Siddarth Kara pulls back the curtain to reveal how mining cobalt -- a toxic mineral that allows lithium batteries to hold more charge for longer periods safely -- dominates the economy of the Democratic Republic of Congo but leaves the "artisanal" miners of the Katanga region with little to no income, no protection from the toxic minerals they handle, and no medical assistance when they inevitably fall ill or are injured at work.

The book brilliantly reveals the "new heart of darkness" found in cities like Kolwezi and assorted villages throughout the southeast portion of the country and how yet another generation of Congolese are offered no alternative to the brutal work of mining the valuable resources the rest of the world wants. Kara explores the history of the country, from the age of "discovery" by Europeans to the rapacious reign of Leopold II of Belgium and through the various Congolese rulers who continued the practice of seizing power and money for themselves, and he finds that the legacy of generations of Congolese has been "so much suffering for so much profit" taken by outsiders. While today's miners might not be beaten or have hands and feet cut off by colonial overseers, they face exposure to radiation (uranium is often found along with cobalt) and toxicity from handling ores with bare skin, being crushed or buried alive in tunnel collapses, becoming disabled by falls, sexual harassment and assault, exposure to sexually transmitted diseases, and even execution for attempting to handle selling the ore themselves for a very slightly higher cost (maybe $2 a day instead of $1).

This is a grim and not terribly hopeful story about how our ambitions for new and better (and sometimes "greener" -- think electric vehicles) technology play a role in the continued subjugation of people in a distant land. But it's an absolutely vital one for those of us in the developed world to read, because it's our consumerism that drives atrocities like these.

Thank you, St. Martin's Press and NetGalley, for providing an eARC of this book. Opinions expressed here are solely my own.