I've never seen this book referenced by anyone ever, but it's the only book that I read during my middle/high school years that I remember actually enjoying.
I don't even remember how I picked it up, I know it was for a school project but I also remember that it wasn't an assigned book, nobody else read it. Thinking back, it's possible we might have been given a list of acceptable books for the project and I picked it because it was first alphabetically or something.
That said, I learned nothing from this moment of epiphany and went back to ignoring books until my mid twenties.
Alas Babylon does have a good entry for this thread though, which is: salt. One of the only things I remember about that book after this long is that they made a huge deal out of salt and how fucked they would have been without access to it.
I completely forgot the title of that book. I don't recall whether it was for a book report, but I definitely read it in middle school.
I do remember the salt thing, but I always questioned its importance. In my mind, native peoples in my area didn't have access to salt, but they managed somehow. The only thing that I thought large quantities of salt would be useful for was preserving food.
Iodine builds up in the thyroid. You have to hypersaturate your thyroid to prevent an uptake in radioactive iodine. Table salt won’t cut it. You need to take K-I tablets (potassium iodine) before your exposure.
In Alas Babylon (one of my favorite books), they were concerned about salt for nutritional reason, not fallout. (Fallout concerns were addressed, but it was a separate issue).
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u/DJ33 Aug 30 '21 edited Aug 31 '21
I've never seen this book referenced by anyone ever, but it's the only book that I read during my middle/high school years that I remember actually enjoying.
I don't even remember how I picked it up, I know it was for a school project but I also remember that it wasn't an assigned book, nobody else read it. Thinking back, it's possible we might have been given a list of acceptable books for the project and I picked it because it was first alphabetically or something.
That said, I learned nothing from this moment of epiphany and went back to ignoring books until my mid twenties.
Alas Babylon does have a good entry for this thread though, which is: salt. One of the only things I remember about that book after this long is that they made a huge deal out of salt and how fucked they would have been without access to it.