Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives

I'm really quite torn rating this. On the one hand, it's a very important book. The dire consequences of our reliance on cobalt in modern technology feel underreported, and I'm glad that care and attention was put to this topic.

On the other hand, the book is incredibly repetitive, as others have mentioned. Any given chapter could make a wonderful essay exposé on cobalt mining, and those chapters could be effectively interchangeable. It felt like the author had a dozen different ways of saying “a child died for your battery” and tried each iteration one at a time to see which would be the most quotable.

So overall, important but oddly-written book, I suppose.