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Title: Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
ISBN: 0312425848
Author:
Svetlana Alexievich
Publicate Date: 2006-04-18
Publish: 2006-04-18
List Price: $14.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.5
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $7.82
Amazon Lowest Used Price: $2.95
Amazon Merchant Price: $11.20
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| Customer Review: |
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1: Devastation Illuminated and Personalized
The facts of the nuclear disaster at Chernobyl trickled out from east to west slowly at first. With the publication of this book, the historian puts a megaphone to the voices of the people who lived through the initial disaster, and who continue to live it in various ways. This is an important book that should not be missed.
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2: Needed history and explainations for better understanding. WHY?
This is a book composed of
MONOLOGUES ABOUT:
I recommend skipping the first pages. Say the first 60., because they are so confusing, crazy. Unreadable. Do all Russians talk in incomplete sentences. Maybe it's the translation. You can't tell what The heck they're really talking about; chernobyl, WWII, or some other past Russian war. Everything's a war to these people. Sad. But it also makes you doubt their professed ignorance of nuclear power.
From this book I get the impression that the Belarusian territory covered is mostly poor families living off the land and state collective farms. Also that they knew absolutely nothing about the dangers of radiation and the dangers of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in their mist. Which doesn't make any sense whatsoever to me given the long history ('47 -'91) of the Russian and U.S. nuclear arms race, SALT I, SALT II, and Ronald Reagan at that very point in time with his "star wars". Surviving a nuclear attack was drummed into us and surely them. I seen one video where in the hall way of the high school pictures of American airplanes are posted.
So I find their ignorance of the dangers hard to swallow. Tho ignorant is just how these people come across in this book. Extremely so. 2.2 million of them still live there in the contaminated zone, continuing to have babies. Ya can't get more stupid than that. I mean it's one thing to risk your own life but quite another to risk an innocent childs with cancer, heart defects, kidney defects. Cripe one child was born with no anus, no vagina, no urethra, one kidney. The defects are astounding but these people just keep having babies. Birth control any one?
The governments not have a evacuation plan in place was inexcusable. I guess you can get away with that kind of stuff in russia.
"The children of Chernobyl have always had a temporary escape route through international charity. Eight-year-old Katya went to Germany last year for a month of fresh food and fresh air.
But now Belarussian President Alexander Lukashenko has threatened to ban such trips, saying children are being corrupted by capitalism." CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT!!!
Belarus Resumes Farming in Chernobyl Radiation Zone
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/22/international/europe/22belarus.html?pagewanted=all
"Over time, the radioactive materials, especially caesium 137, with a half-life of 30 years, will decay, but living and working in the contaminated parts of Belarus will not soon be normal."
Maybe it was the translation. It just didn't help me to fully get the picture. I will keep my eyes open for a better book on the Chernobyl disaster
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3: Nonsensical and Disappointing
After the excellent reviews I read on Amazon, I was very excited to get this book. However, I was very disappointed, as it is stream of consciousness ramblings that often don't make any sense. To be sure, there are a few riveting excerpts throughout the book, but most of it consists of tangents unrelated to Chernobyl. I was expecting accounts of people who had witnessed the disaster and how their lives were affected afterward. It is not nearly that straightforward. Much of it is nonsensical and surreal. For example, there is a section near the beginning of the book that just has a list of quotes from the survivors, with no context. For example, "But now we're free. The harvest is rich. We live like barons." Next, "The only thing I have is a cow. I'd hand her in, if only they don't make another war. How I hate war!" followed by "Here we have the war of wars--Chernobyl!" then, "And the cuckoo is cuckooing, the magpies are chattering, roes are running. Will they reproduce--who knows? One morning, I looked out in the garden, the boars were digging..." I'm not sure if it's a misguided attempt to be poetic or dramatic, but in the end it doesn't make sense and doesn't leave much of an impression.
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4: The Victims Speak
I purchased this book as part of my collection in order to do research for my novel Chernobyl Murders. The book turned out to be more than research. It is a moving account from people who were actually there. Svetlana's interviews, in which she simply allows the victims to tell their stories, are marvelous. I know nuclear power is being promoted again. However, I used to work in the nuclear energy field and there is still much to consider, especially when you go inside any power plant and look at the spent fuel rods simply submerged in pools of water.
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5: Profound and important
This book is a punch in the gut. There's no nicer way to say it. It's downright devastating. It's something that every single person should read. Even if you only know Chernobyl vaguely, two things are made painfully apparent by this book: whatever you've read about Chernobyl in the past has probably grossly underestimated the magnitude of the disaster; and the death and injury toll from the accident hasn't stopped yet. Not by a long shot.
In her quest to expose the human cost of Chernobyl, journalist Svetlana Alexievich presents three years' worth of interviews with a wide cross-section of individuals. Unlike most books about Chernobyl, the focus is on the people of Belarus, who were not evacuated as quickly as their southern neighbors in Ukraine. The breadth of the author's research is astounding. The reader meets the widow of one of the first responders to the Chernobyl accident, a young firefighter who arrived at the nuclear plant clad only in his street clothes and ended up suffering an agonizing death in a Moscow radiation ward only 14 days later. There are children who were evacuated from surrounding cities and parents of children who have died from radiation-related illnesses. There's a respected scientist who, learning of the Chernobyl disaster, made frantic calls to all the Soviet brass in Minsk he could think of, only to be ignored. There are elderly men and women who have returned to the Exclusion Zone to live in solitude, eating radioactive crops. There are liquidators who toiled for months shoring up the reactor's ruins, only to receive a medal, a certificate and a serious or terminal illness as thanks. There's even an ex-Soviet official who tries to justify the cover-ups surrounding the Chernobyl crisis.
No angle is ignored, and no detail, no matter how horrifying, is politely edited out. Alexievich allows her subjects to tell their stories honestly and frankly. Voices from Chernobyl presents a profound moment of truth for a situation that, for 20 years, has been seeped in denial and secrecy. Very highly recommended.
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