Manual for Survival: An Environmental History of the Chernobyl Disaster

by Kate Brown

Overview

Winner of the Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History
Winner of the Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize
Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Nonfiction
Finalist for the Ryszard Kapuscinski Award for Literary Reportage

"A magisterial blend of historical research, investigative journalism, and poetic reportage…[A]n awe-inspiring journey." —Economist

After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, international aid organizations sought to help the victims but were stymied by post-Soviet political roadblocks. Efforts to gain access to the site of catastrophic radiation damage were denied, and the residents of Chernobyl were given no answers as their lives hung in the balance. Drawing on a decade of archival research and on-the-ground interviews in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, Kate Brown unveils the full breadth of the devastation and the whitewash that followed. Her findings make clear the irreversible impact of man-made radioactivity on every living thing; and hauntingly, they force us to confront the untold legacy of decades of weapons-testing and other catastrophic nuclear incidents.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393357769
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Pages:	432
Sales rank:	658,061
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Kate Brown is an award-winning historian of environmental and nuclear history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her previous book, Plutopia, won seven academic prizes. She splits her time between Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Survivor's Manual 1

Part I The Accident

Liquidators at Hospital No. 6 13

Evacuees 26

Rainmakers 40

Operators 46

Ukrainians 56

Physicists and Physicians 67

Part II Hot Survival

Woolly Truths 81

Clean Hides, Dirty Water 95

Making Sausage of Disaster 99

Farms into Factories 108

Part III Man-Made Nature

The Swamp Dweller 119

The Great Chernobyl Acceleration 132

Part IV Post-Apocalypse Politics

The Housekeeper 145

KGB Suspicions 154

Part V Medical Mysteries

Primary Evidence 163

Declassifying Disaster 169

The Superpower Self-Help Initiative 177

Belarusian Somnambulists 183

The Great Awakening 196

Part VI Science across the Iron Curtain

Send for the Cavalry 211

Marie Curie's Fingerprint 216

Foreign Experts 225

In Search of Catastrophe 232

Thyroid Cancer: The Canary in the Medical Mine 240

The Butterfly Effect 249

Looking for a Lost Town 263

Greenpeace Red Shadow 267

The Quiet Ukrainian 275

Part VII Survival Artists

The Pieta 287

Bare Life 296

Conclusion: Berry Picking into the Future 301

Acknowledgments 313

Note on Transliteration and Translation 317

List of Archives and Interviews 319

Notes 323

Index 399

Editorial Reviews

"A remarkable book, distinguished by Kate Brown’s rare combination of skills: formidable archival history, investigative research, and vivid storytelling."

Robert Macfarlane

"Combining the skills of a historian, investigative reporter, and detective Kate Brown has blown the lid off the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster and decades of official efforts to suppress its grim truths. Disturbing in its conclusions, destined to incite controversy, Manual for Survival is first-rate historical sleuthing."

J.R. McNeill

"Kate Brown presents a convincing challenge to the official narrative of the Chernobyl disaster. Deeply reported and elegantly written, Manual for Survival is chilling."

Elizabeth Kolbert

"Brown knows her landscape exceptionally well, down to the last tiny village that suffered from the disaster."

Evening Standard - Serhii Plokhy

"A handbook for a 'postnuclear reality.'"

Nature - Sonja Schmid

"Astonishingly thorough.…[A] revelatory masterpiece."

Orion - Jerry Mathes

"With bountiful, devastating detail, Brown describes how scientists, doctors, and journalists—mainly in Ukraine and Belarus—went to great lengths and took substantial risks to collect information.… One of the most alarming—though also eerily beautiful—aspects of Brown’s book is her description of the way radioactive material moves through organisms, ecosystems, and human society.… Manual for Survival asks a larger question about how humans will coexist with the ever-increasing quantities of toxins and pollutants that we introduce into our air, water, and soil. Brown’s careful mapping of the path isotopes take is highly relevant."

New York Review of Books - Sophie Pinkham

"This engagingly written book reads like a cold war thriller and uncovers the devastating effects of one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters."

Allison Macfarlane

"Manual for Survival is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the local and global effects of Chernobyl, and its continuing impacts."

Science - Elena Aronova

"Gripping.… Kate Brown’s relentless, tenacious reporting shows that Chernobyl isn’t the past at all. Nothing, she makes clear, can stop its radiation from seeping through all attempts to bury the truth for a long time to come. This deftly written, impassioned, courageous book should make the world think twice about what’s at stake when we unleash nuclear reactions."

Alan Weisman

"Brown knows her landscape exceptionally well, down to the last tiny village that suffered from the disaster."

Evening Standard - Serhii Plokhi

★ 12/24/2018

In a gripping book part scientific exploration, part Cold War thriller, Brown (Dispatches from Dystopia), a University of Maryland historian of environmental and nuclear history, investigates the aftermath of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster, and reveals why ferreting out the truth about it is so difficult. The Soviet government assured the world that the meltdown’s repercussions weren’t severe, with only 54 plant staff and firefighters dead from acute radiation sickness, and minimal exposure of families, who’d been swiftly evacuated to safety. But behind that optimistic lie, there were secrets on all sides. The Soviet government didn’t want to reveal how much it actually knew about radiation effects, or how it had learned that information. The American government, meanwhile, refused to share information from its own medical study of Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims with the Soviets. As the crumbling Soviet Union fought to avoid blame, historians and scientists struggled to document data before it disappeared, and Chernobyl victims found their lives dropped into the hands of bureaucrats more interested in covering up the truth than in helping them. Brown’s in-depth research and clean, concise writing illuminate the reality behind decades of “half-truths and bald-faced lies.” Readers will be fascinated by this provocative history of a deadly accident and its consequences. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 2018-12-30

An award-winning historian challenges the notion that the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident had few consequences, arguing that the "public health disaster" killed at least 35,000 to 150,000 people and left most adults and children in affected areas sick with cancer, anemia, and other illnesses.

In this explosive, exquisitely researched account, Brown (Environmental and Nuclear History/Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County; Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters, 2013, etc.) draws on four years of fieldwork in Soviet and other archives—27 total, some previously unvisited—and in towns and farms in contaminated territories to provide a powerful story of the devastating health and environmental effects of radioactive fallout in areas outside the 30-kilometer Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. "The accounts of unspecific, widespread, and chronic illness, reproductive problems, and acute increases in cancer resound like a lament across the area of Chernobyl fallout," she writes. The official death toll from the exploding nuclear power plant was 54, but there was never any long-term study of health consequences, including the effects of exposure to radiation over time. After interviewing workers, evacuees, and scientists; visiting affected factories, swamp ecosystems, and abandoned towns; and examining transcripts of secret Politburo meetings and other documents, the author concludes that Soviet officials hid the radiation's impact through "secrecy, censorship, counterespionage, and fabricated news." In the face of Soviet "half-truths and bald-faced lies," international scientists nodded agreeably. Like the Soviets, Western officials blamed stress—not radiation—for health issues, out of fear of Chernobyl's implications for other radiation exposures and possible lawsuits. Brown's prose is sometimes technical but largely accessible and even turns poetic when she describes changed lives. She offers horrifying descriptions of the processing of radioactive meat and other foods for shipment to large cities and towns and of the continuing sale abroad of contaminated berries.

This sobering book should be read—and studied—by policymakers and citizens; pair with Adam Higginbotham's Midnight in Chernobyl to spark a renewed debate over nuclear power.

Kirkus Reviews