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.

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

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 them.

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 quiet another to risk an innocent child 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?

About 70% of the radiation from neighboring Ukraine's 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster entered Belarusian territory, and as of 2005 about a fifth of Belarusian land (principally farmland and forests in the southeastern provinces) continues to be affected by radiation fallout. The United Nations and other agencies have aimed to reduce the level of radiation in affected areas, especially through the use of cesium binders and rapeseed (CANOLA) cultivation, which are meant to decrease soil levels of cesium-137. DO THEY EXPORT THE HARVEST?

Belarus Resumes Farming in Chernobyl Radiation Zone
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/22/international/europe/22belarus.html?pagewanted=all

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!!!

Timeline: Belarus: A chronology of key events: 2007 October - President Lukashenko says that Belarus will have to build a nuclear power station in order to meet its energy needs. HAHAHAHAHA! NEVER LEARN
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/country_profiles/1118391.stm

"From every rock we turn over, we find consequences," he told the Associated Press in a phone interview. "These reports of wildlife flourishing in the area are completely anecdotal and have no scientific basis."
Contaminated zone near Chernobyl nuclear plant becomes wildlife haven, intriguing biologists http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007/06/08/science/14_02_126_7_07.txt

Number of operating NPPs in August 2007 438
First NPP Obninsk, Russia, 1954
Most powerful NPP Chooz, France, 1455 MW
Share of nuclear energy in world energy production 17%
Number of countries with operating NPPs 30
Number of NPPs under construction (August 2007) 31
Number of NPPs that started operation in year 2007 2
Number of shut down NPPs 119
Number of decommissioned NPPs 17

Take a look see and listen http://www.dailymotion.com/related/5196025/video/x33brv_land-of-the-wolves-mesmerism
And there are more.

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.

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.

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.

Touching first hand accounts of the people effected by the fallout of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Accounts of how land and the popluation were forever devasted and chagned, how the Soviet government secretly handled the containment and clean up and blinded many who dutifully responded by withholding and not inforing of the danger. The first story of the wife of a fireman who was one of the first on scene and her pain as she watched him die was the most gripping account to me. First hand accounts tell of poeple who have remained in Chernobyl, the way the land once looked and now looks and the soldiers who were sent to guard and contain the site. Overall I did find the book touching and intereting but towards the end, I did find the stories somewhat redundant of the theme.

This book brought tears to my eyes reading the stories that these people have gone through. One would have to be made of stone not to cry over all that these wonderful people have had to go through.

Stories of love, death, sickness,pain, despair, and the reality of what could happen here in the States if we ever had a nuclear accident like they did. We must not grow lax or lazy and think it could not happen here, because the truth of the matter is that it could happen here. This book has convinced me more than ever, that nuclear power is not something that I want us to pursue as an souce of energy in this country.

I believe that it is important that I pass this book on so that more people can read this book. I want as many people to read this book, so that they know the facts of what would happen if we had a nuclear accident here in the States.

This was not the book I was looking for but it was the book I read. Far from an historical recreation of the disaster, Voices from Chernobyl is a personal confessional, a lyric documentation of intense human emotions. Svetlana Alexiech presents each story without comment or judgement. It is a stream of conscoiusness, profoundly moving in the face of this 1986 nuclear disaster, the gross incompetence of the Soviet Government and failure to contain the radioactive contamination. The stories are of those who stayed, those who came to help, those who died and those who survived. Haunting, moving, emotional, revealing, shocking, sad and inspirational. This book will stay with you long after the last page is turned.

This was not the book I was looking for but it was the book I read. Far from an historical recreation of the disaster, Voices from Chernobyl is a personal confessional, a lyric documentation of intense human emotions. Svetlana Alexiech presents each story without comment or judgement. It is a stream of conscoiusness, profoundly moving in the face of this 1986 nuclear disaster, the gross incompetence of the Soviet Government and failure to contain the radioactive contamination. The stories are of those who stayed, those who came to help, those who died and those who survived. Haunting, moving, emotional, revealing, shocking, sad and inspirational. This book will stay with you long after the last page is turned.

This book is a collection of stories, commentaries, and monologues from the people who lived and continue to live through the Chernobyl crisis. Their voices are simple and honest but come from the heart and clearly depict their hardship and suffering. Their voices also give portrayal to their culture which combines old world peasantry and Soviet collectivism that is clashing with an unexplainable, unseeable, and futuristic horror. It is this clash that renders the whole catastrophe so heartbreaking. That a simple, family oriented, agrarian society who have already lived through so much suffering be victim to such an accident is quite heartbreaking. And to make matters worse, the lack of education, support, protection, and management by the Soviet government is apalling. The failures of a socialistic bureacracy are quite apparent. After reading this book, I can clearly argue why nuclear technology should not be placed in the hands of governments such as Iran or North Korea who already have a record of irresponsibility. Allowing these countries to develop nuclear energy is like giving a three year old a loaded gun to play with. Well written and well deserving of the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction.

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).

says an evacuee in Voices of Chernobyl, an absolutely riveting collection of oral histories of people from all walks of life, affected for eternity by the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Reactor on April 26, 1986. "A Solitary Human Voice," the prologue, recounted by a woman whose husband was one of the first on the scene as a firefighter, will lure you in and, once there, you'll feel compelled to continue to the end, painful as it may be. She's pregnant, newly married and very much in love when she hears the news. The doctors and nurses and try to no avail to keep her away from her husband once he's done his duty at the plant and then sent to a special hospital in Moscow for victims of radiation poisoning, along with six other firemen. Her baby dies. Her husband dies, horribly, the last of the seven of his crew.

These stories of "Chernobylites," the stigmatized and disdained victims of the accident, share a common theme. The government was neither truthful nor forthcoming about the level of danger that those living near the area of the Chernobyl plant experienced. They did not provide the victims with information on treatment in a timely manner, because it would have meant admitting that a horrible accident had actually occurred. Those who tried to warn others of the danger were silenced or mocked. Men were sent to clean up the site and were given extra pay in exchange, ultimately, for their lives. Because people could not see the radiation, they kept on eating contaminated food, breathing contaminated air, using contaminated clothing and living (approximately 2.1 million people) on contaminated land. Immediately afterwards, men were sent to kill the domestic animals, evacuate the people and, using shovels and minimal protective gear, remove the contaminated soil. Although precautions were recommended, like minimizing time spent in contaminated areas, tracking and limiting the amount of radiation a person was exposed to, and lining pits dug to dump the contaminated soil to prevent contamination of the groundwater, radiation detectors, even when used, rarely worked and, if they did, improperly, and liners were not typically used, almost ensuring that aquifers would become contaminated. People were encouraged not to have children, thus thousands of abortions were performed. Even those children born without birth defects spent much of their shortened lives in hospitals, suffering from radiation exposure-related diseases. Yet, thousands returned home and, willingly ate, drank, lived and live a life of everlasting contamination.

This is a must read for all those who keep hearing our president say nuclear power is "safe and clean." The liquidator, one of about 700,000 who came to "clean up" Chernobyl, who burned all his clothes and gave his little son the hat he had worn -- and his son developed a brain tumor; all the disbelief about the danger of radioactivity, that the people could not see or taste; the forest that turned orange from the reactor fire at Chernobyl; all the secrecy about the area and the secret reports; 200,000 abortions in Byeloruss in just 1993 alone, as claimed [not mentioned whether/how many were spontaneous and how many were medical procedures -- nevertheless, no one wants a deformed child, and the area is contaminated for at least 300-600 years because of the cesium to start with, cesium having a "half life" of 30 years, and a "hazardous life" of 300-600 years) by one teacher; the physicist who wrote everything down, the belief that nuclear power could make something out of nothing, nuclear engineers the elite of scientists with the most perks and pay; all of this coming down with the apocalyptic Chernobyl accident of April 26, 1986. Premature deaths and cancers probably running into the hundreds of thousands. Read this book. Just about each vignette/voice is very personal, touching, informative, and very important. Especially to the power hungry who care not for the truth, and what can happen with ANY nuclear power plant.

Conrad Miller M.D.
Southampton, N.Y.

This is a must read for anyone and everyone. It brings to life the realities of a horrible disaster. It shows us that the rest of world has bigger problems than we do. Yet, it shows that the rest of the world has the same souls as we do. they love, they hurt, they cry, they live their lives and just try to get by. GET THIS BOOK.