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

Kara's book is a moral confrontation with the supply chains that make modern life feel frictionless. He follows cobalt from Congolese mines into global technology, insisting that consumers and corporations reckon with human cost. The reporting foregrounds miners' experiences—danger, exploitation, injury, and precarity. Kara is blunt about responsibility and systems, refusing to treat suffering as an unfortunate side effect. The narrative exposes how legality can coexist with abuse, and how opacity protects profit. It's written with urgency and anger, but also with a commitment to documentation. The book forces readers to see extraction as a contemporary form of violence, not a distant problem. The scale is global, but the detail stays human. You may find it hard to read—because it is hard truth. And yet that difficulty is part of its purpose. A fierce, essential work of witness and accountability.