Customer Reviews

Chernobyl: A Novel

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A totally gripping book. Written a very short time after the Chernobyl accident, this novel is a wonderful story about the people of that doomed town. I loved the way Pohl, a great SF writer, mixes the engineering details with the human drama.

The political stuff in the book has been overshadowed by the unrealness what *really* happened in Russia after it has been written; but it's still a must-read, in my opinion.

Realizing how much of a tragedy Chernobyl turned out to be, I remembered being stationed over in Belgium at the time of the fallout during my naval career. Tie that together with my personal fascination of nuclear power plant engineering, touring the Enrico Fermi II nuclear power plant outside of Detroit and Monroe Michigan while in high school before it was finished, and reading nearly every publication written about the Fermi disaster and Three Mile Island, I had to get this book many years ago when it first came out. Fully realizing it is, in fact, a fictional novel built up around historical facts, I dove into this book and realized the level of understanding that Pohl, the author, knew about nuclear engineering. Now that I've found the book again after losing it all of these years, I'll be ordering it again. Pohl lays out the details completely, as the events unfolded, and ties in an excellent yarn in between from the engineers on site to the stricken town of Pripyat. The personal accounts, tied in with the facts that complete the story of Chernobyl, the book makes you wonder if some of Pohl's imagination were possibly true. A truly deep, emotional, and technical journey into the Chernobyl story, I highly recommend readers purchase this book. Mine was lost during the many shipments I endured during my career in the Navy, so do not lose it!

It's easy to forget that this book is fiction. It remains close to actual events as they were known at the time. It is intense and feels very personal and real. Since then people of Ukraine have suffered horribly from the legacy of radioactive pollution from this disaster. We must never forget. This book helps. I wish it was better known. Read it. You won't regret it.

This book was published in 1987 in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster that occurred at the nuclear power plant in the Ukraine. The well written story weaves human tragedy and triumph with historical and technical facts. The causes and effects are as real, as credible, and as risky today as they were in that actual event. And the lasting environmental ramifications are explained in layman terms for us. The environmental effects have not diminished much over the decades due to the volume and nature of the contaminants that were released into the atmosphere. Yet human memory and attention span have all but forgotten and ignored the toxins we now live with. This book should be your primer on nuclear dangers and the potential effects on mankind. It is an excellent read.

The book was very descriptive of the events that happened on the inside of plant. It was to sad for me to read though, took me awhile to make it through the entire book.