Customer Reviews

Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World's Deadliest Industrial Disaster

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

 

 

"Five Past Midnight in Bhopal" documents the story of the famous disaster at the Union Carbide plant in India that killed between 16,000 and 30,000 people. The reason the death toll is so variable is because most of the victims were among the very poorest in a country that has a staggering numbers of such people. Whole familes were killed, leaving nobody behind to report their deaths. Authors Dominic Lapierre and Javier Moro recount the disaster by using the technique of the non-fiction novel rather than reporting the events in a straight narrative. There are no notes and no bibliography, just a 400 page narrative of the story from the inception of the plans to build the Union Carbide plant to the aftermath of the tragedy.

The authors build the story through interviews with the workers at the plant, survivors from the city and several Union Carbide employees. The tale that emerges is one of an unfortunately preventable disaster that occurred because of misguided corporate decisions, the faultiest of which was probably the decision to build and run such a technologically complex and potentially dangerous facility in a third world country in the first place. Union Carbide also suffered from a misreading of the Indian marketplace and ultimately from a horribly misguided cost cutting plan that decimated safety proceedures at the plant and directly led to the disaster.

Lapierre and Moro are excellent writers whose prose is compellingly readable, though a bit overly dramatic at times. The style of the book is likely to put off some readers, who may be expecting more straightforward reporting. I should also note that the book concludes with an appeal for donations to help the poverty stricken in India, further illustrating that it is not a work of journalism. Nevertheless, this is an important story that deserves to retold as a cautionary note to both big business and to governments.

Overall, a gruesome story of man made disaster that most readers will likely find both moving and enraging.

Rarely I start a book and can not put it down until the very last page. Being a avid reader of various topics for many years, Five Past Midnight at Bhopal was one such book, that made me stay till two in the morning, unable to put it down.
I faintly remember the incident at Bhopal, having been fairly young at the time to take in all the details, or appreciate the human tragedy that has occured, so I did not hesitate to buy this book as soon as it was published, being previously unfamilair with the works of Lapierre and Moro.
What makes this book so powerful is its unflinching humanity. Some of the thousands of victims that died that night, suddenly were alive with a history, and the authors with obvious sympathy, transform wretched, destitute, outcast people into heroes..their lives, joys, aspirations, optimism in the face of impossible odds is a wonderful triumph of the human spirit, regardless of how many gods it worships.
The moment when one of these people gets the first TV set, to the amazement of all the slum dwellers, is very touching and powerful..When the wedding preparations are made, and the joy of the parents borrowing money from a usurer to make it the most beautiful day of their daughter's life, is full of dignity..In short, the authors succeed on one level, to pay hommage to people that are forgotten in their own country and certainly in the world.
Yet the whole book is about the tragedy of the factory, and although I believe that the incident was partly caused by the cost cutting of Union Carbide,partly because of the inefficiency, and lack of training of the employees..(I did not join the authors in their apparent anti globalization undertones), the effect and devastation was mind boggling.
Yet why this book works beautifully, is simply because the authors have presented us with the lives of many characters, and when the tragedy strikes, we care enough about these people to turn every page in anticipation to know their fate.
It also reads like a thriller, escalating tension up until the fateful moment..
I did not finish the book accusing anyone, it is a tragic accident, rather I had a great feeling about how great the human spirit can be, the notion of selfless sacrifice coming alive.
If anything, I think the proceeds of this book will help some of the victims, which will make it an essential buy.

Five Past Midnight in Bhopal: The Epic Story of the World's Deadliest Industrial Disaster, Dominique Lapierre and Javier Moro - The gas leak in Bhopal in the winter of 1984 claimed 3,787 lives. That's the official count; unofficial estimates range from 20,000 dead and half a million suffering from the after-effects of inhaling a noxious gas. Why did the tragedy happen? Simple: greed. Union Carbide, in a zeal to supply more pesticide than could be used in the subcontinent, built a plant to produce the pesticide locally. When the Indian droughts and distribution problems conspired to reduce their revenues, UC did what any western corporation does with pride: reduce costs. In this case, costs were reduced by allowing the safety systems of the plant to atrophy. The air-conditioner which should have maintained a regulating temprature was shut down; the flare which would normally have burned off the excess gas was extinguished; the pipes which would have shunted the execss gas to other tanks were left to rust; the employees who should be monitoring the saftey functions of the plant were let go. After all, UC thought, a plant that was not producing any pesticide could not turn into an environment disaster. They were wrong.
Due to a series of unfortunate occurences, gas pressure built up in the tanks causing it to escape, with deadly results. Since UC had not seen fit to provide information on the composition of the gas (Methyl isocynate, or MIC) to the local government, no effective antidote could be used by the hospitals when affected people started to arrive. By the morning of December 3, 1984, thousands were dead.
The name Bhopal is synonymous with the disaster that occurred there 20 years ago. To this date, no criminal proceedings have been held to hold UC responsible (UC was bought out by Dow Chemicals in 2000, and no longer exists as an independent company; Dow absolves all responsibility of the disaster). UC settled with the Indian government on a sum of US $470 million. After 20 years, about US $300 million are still with the Indian government awaiting disbursements to people who are no longer alive, or even if they are alive, are dying a slow and painful death. The Indian government, maybe out of inertia, or maybe out of the mistaken belief that future multi-nationals may not invest in India if UC is charged with criminal neglect, has not done anything to prosecute UC. UC, for its part, blames the accident on a disgruntled employee! The CEO of UC, Warren Anderson, lives in anonymity in the US; he is a wanted person in India. Thousands of lives have been lost and millions affected, all brushed aside by a UC statement that distills these enormous losses to a "per share loss of 0.43 cents!"
This is a great book, written in the same style that Dominique Lapierre uses for "Freedom At Midnight". 2/3 of the book is devoted to glimpses in the lives of the people who were the hardest hit by the gas leak; the remaining 1/3 is devoted to the actual leak. This book should be a must read for all multi-nationals that espouse to exploit the cheap third world labor market. It is a telling fact that when smaller amounts of gas leaks in UC plants occurred in the US, one of the affected women went to college to get a degree in environment issues and armed with it, battled UC in the courts (and prevailed). The affected people in Bhopal did not have such a chance, nor can they even comprehend this as a way of battling corporations. India has a long way to go before it considers itself a first world country. For more information, see Union Carbide's official site on the Bhopal Disaster (http://www.bhopal.com), and a non- government organization site (http://www.bhopal.org), which to me is far more believable than UC's site.

The Union Carbide disaster was truly a grave tragedy of the modern industrialised world. Lapierre presents the events which lead up the disaster of 3rd December 1984 with in-depth detail. His description of the chemical processes, the reasoning behind where the factory was located and the political wrangling which went on before and after the factory was established gives the reader a broad insight in to events leading up to the disaster.

Lapierre describes in vivid detail both how Carbide, as a company, insisted on high standards, yet failed to carry through their own doctrines on safety and let the factory in Bhopal fall apart. Lapierre continues to revealing Carbide's own problems with their factory in Charleston, Carolina where similar smaller scale leaks caused human damage and death. The pictures contained in the book are in places shocking and reveal the true extent to human suffering caused by the deadly gases expelled from the factory in Bhopal.

What really lifts this book up is the description of the villagers from the various "bustee's" around the factory sight. You really begin to know each one of the characters and at times the pivotal roles they played amongst the villages.

A tragic reality which the book reveals is how the west exploit, even today, the developing countries and use them as testing grounds for some of the most destructive and dangerous substances known to man. Even after the Carbide disaster, almost immediately afterwards, the next pesticide marketing campaign kicked off showing that the cost of human life in India is often regarded as negligible by so many foreign investors and firms.

I have found some of Lapierre's previous works rather repetitive but I must hand it to him with this book. He has written a magnificent account of events in the Bhopal disaster and I would highly recommend it to anyone even remotely interested in what is one of the worst chemical disasters the world has ever seen.

When a cruise missile destroys a target, there is a certain level of responsibility on Raytheon, the manufacturer. That type of corporate complicity though, is subservient to the lion's share of the blame which would go to the government that uses the cruise missile. In the case of Union Carbide, no such opportunities to share the blame exist. The deaths of up to 30,000 people lie directly at the door of the company as has been made clear in several books, Five Past Midnight in Bhopal being the most recent.

It is unfortunate that the massacre perpetrated in Bhopal is given only a marginal telling here. The story is fairly compelling and it does have a creeping sense of doom as ones reads it. Often times though, the authors drop into cliché and melodrama. Many of the people in the book are revealed as one-dimensional, polarizing the guilty and innocent. If the victims of the crime were thugs of some sort, their characters should remain irrelevant. The same should go for those who are largely decent people, painting them as angelic does nothing to further the quest for justice against Union Carbide (since absorbed by Rhône-Poulenc and Dow Chemical). It's merely an attempt to tug at the heartstrings of the reader, of whom only the most imbecilic or callous would fail to identify with the victim and convict the perpetrator. That is not to say that the authors should not have tried to give the victims names and personalities, only that the way it is done here is often times unbearable. When it does come through though, it's effective. Drawing a depth of character that allows the reader to focus on what exactly the cost is going to be to these people, one can feel a bit of personal loss with the victims. The other main flaw that comes to mind is one that might have been identified by one of the blurbs on the back cover. In the book A Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger gives thoughts, actions and motives (even dialogue) to people after all communication from them had been cut off. This was done despite the fact there is absolutely zero reason to think that any of it happened or that the characters were even alive at that point. Passing such tripe off as nonfiction is repulsive. When there is some evidence that might help recreate the last moments of people, as in Bhopal where the bodies of the killed were available at the time, there can be a limited amount of reasonable supposition. In the case of Five Past Midnight in Bhopal, this reviewer thinks the authors stretched a bit beyond reasonable credulity. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, the authors have recounted a piece of history and found to put the blame where most others have as well. Perhaps the melodrama and angel-raising could have been cut a bit to provide a better glimpse about the struggle for justice in the time since the mass-killing but that decision belongs to the authors, not to me.

Reliable estimates put the total number of fatalities from the gassing of Bhopal higher than the number of Kurds gassed at Halabja by Saddam Hussein in one of his more famous crimes. The mens rea is clear for both crimes, one through direct malice, and one through reckless behavior that reasonable people could expect to lead to death. This is well established using Union Carbide's own materials. The safety reports convict the company on their own yet, justice is conspicuously absent to the people of Bhopal, with the complicity of the American government and the offensive lack or personal responsibility on the part of the Warren Anderson and the others chiefs of Union Carbide. Five Past Midnight in Bhopal gives a good account of the events and the behavior that lead up to the worst industrial catastrophe in history, it unfortunately does so with marginal storytelling ability and prose.

A story so engaging, so well written, so provocative, so terrifying, that all high school civics teachers, science teachers, and college professors should make it required reading.

On 3rd Dec 1984, over 30,000 people of Bhopal died through cyanide poisoning from the nearby Union Carbide plant. More than 500,000 were seriously injured. Dominique Lapierre's book attempts to provide the inside story on this disaster as well as to provide the point-of-view of those who were most affected, the poor victims. Lapierre attempts to explore the motivations and actions of all parties involved including Union Carbide's management, the victims, the Indian government and the Americans. Actually, this book is a tribute to all those victims who have not received justice in spite of many tall claims that they would. Having read "City of Joy" which made me cringe when I read about the open sewers of Calcutta slums, Lapierre's work on Bhopal makes me feel that this author is a true friend of the downtrodden.

Reading this book on a plane back from India, I admired the way the author was able to blend in the texture of the city and all the different forces at work: from people struggling for their daily existence to the enthusiastic engineers who built the plant .

From cursory knowledge of the incident, I always thought that Union Carbide skimped when building the plant--not installing adequate safety measures, etc. I also had read carbide literature which blames the accident on sabotage, tea breaks, and other nonsense.

Lapierre gives a balanced view and shows how the plant, which was initially closely monitored, was allowed to deteriorate in order to save costs.

What makes the book worth reading is the people--especially the heroism of people during the night of the tragedy, amazing. Definitely worth reading.

The book starts telling two different stories. One is about an Indian family of peasants which, after a period of dry weather, is forced to abandon their land and to move in the suburbia of Bhopal. The other is about the Union Carbide, a huge American chemical company, which, at the beginning of the Sixties, decides to enter the Indian market of pesticides with its new product called Sevin. In order to accomplish its goal, the Union Carbide builds a factory near the suburbia of Bhopal. In this way, the two separate stories start to tie one with the other. They melt in a single story that ends with the tragic chemical accident that happened at the Bhopal plant of the Union Carbide, the night between the 2nd and the 3rd of December 1984, causing 30.000 deaths and 500.000 injured.

I think the author did a very accurate research work. Every character is fully described and every fact is well documented. The great quantity of details gives an astonishing realism to every phase of the story.

A sad and nauseating feeling when the final pages of the book was read.

The book would have easily got a five star rating from me - Had it been written by any other mortals...But not for Dominique Lapierre.

Dominique Lapierre is perhaps the greatest living historian of our times. This book pales in comparision to his previous collections like "Freedom At Midnight", partly because this is a "tiny Incident" that created a "catastrophy", unlike his other books where the theme spanned along a protracted period of time ( Freedom at Midnight, for example depicts a two year time frame)

Neverthless, The author has no control over events at that time - Explaining to some of the critics here as to why the book is at times not that gripping.Bhopal was definitly one of the worst that could have happened to Humanity and the way he unfolds the tragedy commends appreciation - Beginning all the way with noble intentions of Union Carbide - Greed that crept in later- Irresponsibility, a classic ingredient of any safety department in India - Indifference of employees sipping Tea as the gas leaked etc..

Similar to the start in "City of Joy", it is Ratna Nadar, a poor migrant who begins his saga....Greedy Arjun Singh (former Chief Minister ) Reporter Tejswani, Padmini - the Young child to get married, Hydrocyanide gas, MIC all blended in perfect proportions to make this book a good novel too....

Only problem is the people who died in this book are all real - They died in excruciating pain.foam, froth and oedema and the author is able to successfully portray with full impact almost after twenty years..

Atleast I hope this book is another ammunition for the 30,000 dead victims and 500,000 survivors in getting more than the paltry 470 million Dollars settlement and bringing the "golfing" leaders ( Anderson , the chairman) living in the mansion of "Palm Beach" to justice.