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Chernobyl
- History of a Tragedy
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
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Publisher's Summary
Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy, read by Leighton Pugh.
Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize.
The gripping story of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, from an acclaimed historian and writer.
On the morning of 26 April 1986, Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history: the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine. The outburst put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation. In the end, less than 5 percent of the reactor's fuel escaped, but that was enough to contaminate over half of Europe with radioactive fallout.
In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy re-creates these events in all of their drama, telling the stories of the firefighters, scientists, engineers, workers, soldiers and policemen who found themselves caught in a nuclear Armageddon and succeeded in doing the seemingly impossible: extinguishing the nuclear inferno and putting the reactor to sleep. While it is clear that the immediate cause of the accident was a turbine test gone wrong, Plokhy shows how the deeper roots of Chernobyl lay in the nature of the Soviet political system and the flaws of its nuclear industry. A little more than five years later, the Soviet Union would fall apart, destroyed from within by its unsustainable communist ideology and the dysfunctional managerial and economic systems laid bare in the wake of the disaster.
A poignant, fast-paced account of the drama of heroes, perpetrators and victims, Chernobyl is the definitive history of the world's worst nuclear disaster.
Critic Reviews
"An insightful and important book, that often reads like a good thriller, and that exposes the danger of mixing powerful technology with irresponsible politics." (Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens)
"As moving as it is painstakingly researched...a cracking read." (Viv Groskop, Observer)
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- Tiah
- 20-01-2023
Super interesting
Found this book very interesting & I enjoyed the narrators voice - if you find this topic interesting i recommend.
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- Anonymous User
- 21-08-2021
The epilogue sums it up
However dire was Chernobyl, we are starting to see the effects of Climate Change as orders of magnitude worse in terms of deaths and ruining hundreds of thousands of lives ALREADY … and its barely begun. After decades of ‘renewables’ achieving remarkably little contribution to insatiable energy requirements, with the move to electric transport slated to DOUBLE that within a decade, only ‘New Nuclear’ has the capacity to deliver that. No amount of solar, wind, batteries, geo thermal or hydro can compete, however necessary their contribution will also be.
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- Anonymous User
- 02-10-2022
Deep dive
This story fascinates me. Really enjoyed this deep dive into it and the aftermath it caused.
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