Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster [Paperback]

Svetlana Alexievich (Author), Keith Gessen (Translator)

Book Description

Release date: April 18, 2006

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award

On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown---from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster---and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Comprised of interviews in monologue form, Voices from Chernobyl is a crucially important work, unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A chorus of fatalism, stoic bravery and black, black humor is sounded in this haunting oral history of the 1986 nuclear reactor catastrophe in what is now northeastern Ukraine. Russian journalist Alexievich records a wide array of voices: a woman who clings to her irradiated, dying husband though nurses warn her "that's not a person anymore, that's a nuclear reactor"; a hunter dispatched to evacuated villages to exterminate the household pets; soldiers sent in to clean up the mess, bitter at the callous, incompetent Soviet authorities who "flung us there, like sand on the reactor," but accepting their lot as a test of manhood; an idealistic nuclear engineer whose faith in communism is shattered. And there are the local peasants who take this latest in a long line of disasters in stride, filtering back to their homes to harvest their contaminated potatoes, shrugging that if they survived the Germans, they'll survive radiation. Alexievich shapes these testimonies into novelistic "monologues" that convey a vivid portrait of late-Communist malaise, in which bullying party bosses, paranoid propaganda and chaotic mobilizations are resisted with bleak sarcasm ("It wasn't milk, it was a radioactive byproduct"), mournful philosophizing ("[t]he mechanism of evil will work under conditions of apocalypse") and lots of vodka. The result is an indelible X-ray of the Russian soul.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

*Starred Review* "Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide." On April 26, 1986, the people of Belarus lost everything when a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station exploded. Many people died outright, and many were evacuated, forced to leave behind everything from pets to family photographs. Millions of acres remain contaminated, and thousands of people continue to be afflicted with diseases caused by radiation as 20 tons of nuclear fuel sit in a reactor shielded by a leaking sarcophagus known as the Cover. For three years, journalist Alexievich spoke with scores of survivors--the widow of a first responder, an on-the-scene cameraman, teachers, doctors, farmers, Party bureaucrats, a historian, scientists, evacuees, resettlers, grandmothers, mothers--and she now presents their shocking accounts of life in a poisoned world. And what quintessentially human stories these are, as each distinct voice expresses anger, fear, ignorance, stoicism, valor, compassion, and love. Alexievich put her own health at risk to gather these invaluable frontline testimonies, which she has transmuted into a haunting and essential work of literature that one can only hope documents a never-to-be-repeated catastrophe. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Picador; Reprint edition (April 18, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312425848
• ISBN-13: 978-0312425845
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.4 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #51,256 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #3 in Books > History > Europe > Belarus
  • #9 in Books > History > Europe > Ukraine
  • #71 in Books > History > Asia > Russia

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 54 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Mesmerizing and chilling May 3, 2005

By M. Grigsby VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover

This book is a translation of interviews with survivors 10 years after Chernobyl. The first-person descriptions of living in the "Zone" after the disaster, and the implications of living in radioactivity is chilling and compelling. The book is full of heartbreaking stories of Russian people who survived WWII but then were confronted with another disaster of unbelievable magnitude. I absolutely couldn't put this book down, and feel that it should be promoted as one of the best books of the year. As we are now approaching the 20th anniversary of this event, I keep wondering how many of those people interviewed in 1996 are still alive. This book deserves a huge audience!

43 of 47 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Deeply disturbing November 30, 2006

By Stephen Balbach

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Occasionally I'll read first-hand accounts about human catastrophes in the modern world, such as Sudan or Rwanda or Katrina, because it offers a window into what I as a middle class American normally would never see or experience, hopefully making me a better and wiser person without becoming numb or a "dark tourist". Books are more subtle and rich than film and more rewarding in the end.

As an oral history this is a frightening experience (the term "experience" emphasized). Chernobyl has been largely hushed up and kept quiet, the scope of it is worse than most know or understand (occasionally we hear a few hundred or thousand people died and certain cancers are slightly up, don't believe it, much worse). Only about %5 of the nuclear material escaped so it was a minor accident on the scale of things. There is a %50 chance of another meltdown happening elsewhere in the world over the next 40 years (sourced in book). Had Chernobyl been a full meltdown much of Europe would be dieing off as we speak. 16 more Chernobyl-type reactors are still in operation (14 in Russia). As Alexievich says in her epitaph: "These people had already seen what for everyone else is still unknown. I felt like I was recording the future."

The disaster of Chernobyl is still going today, it never ended, it is like AIDS - it just keeps getting worse, there is no cure for radiation which lasts 100s of 1000s of years. The radiated material is finding its way outside of the "Zone" and spreading slowly around the world. Down the rivers into the seas, blown on dust, carried out by hand by bandits in the form of trucks and TV's and scrap metal sold to Asian scrap metal firms which build the goods we buy, grown in food and sold on the world market. I put this book down thinking two things: where can I buy a gieger counter and where can I buy iodine.

Alexievic is a fascinating person her books published around the world in over 19 languages; translated authors don't get big billing in the USA but she is a world-class author and pretty well known in Europe. The Stalinst-Soviet style government of Belorussia (her home country) is not sympathetic to independent journalists (they end up dead). She has a fairly detailed personal website (I can't post links on Amazon but Google search on her name).

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Profound and important September 9, 2007

By !!!

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

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.