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Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster cover

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

Adam Higginbotham

1

award won

15

score

#284 of 3,809 books · #99 in History

Won the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction (2020). Also shortlisted or longlisted for 1 other award.

Midnight in Chernobyl won the Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence and was a New York Times and Time Best Book of the Year and a Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year. Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering one of the twentieth century's greatest disasters. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute. Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth.

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Publisher
Simon & Schuster
ISBN-13
9781501134630
Genre
History
Topics
Chernobyl nuclear disasterSoviet Union historyNuclear technology and safety

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