Voices from Chernobyl

Front Cover
Dalkey Archive Press, 2005 - BUSINESS & ECONOMICS - 240 pages
On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Although the Soviet government claims that only 31 people died as a result, the aftermath of the event is astounding. Over 485 villages are lost, and approximately 2.1 million people (including 700,000 children) live on contaminated land. There is no official record of how many thousands have died, but thousands of children have been born with catastrophic birth defects. Countless others suffer ongoing health problems resulting from their exposure to radiation. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of what happened to the people of Belarus, and the fear, anger, and uncertainty that they still live with. In order to give voice to their experiences, Svetlana Alexievich -- a journalist by trade who now suffers from an immune deficiency developed while researching this book -- interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown: from innocent citizens, to firefighters, to those called in to clean up the disaster. Voices from Chernobyl is a crucial document of a disaster and how the government has masked its seriousness, making the event even more tragic through deception and lies. Presenting her interviews in monologue form, Alexievich gives readers a harrowing view inside the minds of those affected, untempered by government rhetoric; the reader is left with the shattering pain of living through such an event and its aftermath. - Jacket flap.

From inside the book

Contents

Historical Note
1
THE LAND OF THE DEAD
25
About a Whole Life Written down on Doors
34
Copyright

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About the author (2005)

Svetlana Alexievich was born in Stanislav, Ukraine, Soviet Union on May 31, 1948. She became a journalist and wrote narratives from interviews with witnesses to events such as World War II, the Soviet-Afghan war, the fall of the Soviet Union, and the Chernobyl disaster. Her books include Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War and War's Unwomanly Face. She won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2005 for Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster and the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature. Keith Gessen was born in Russia and educated at Harvard. He is a founding editor of n+1 and has written about literature and culture for Dissent, The Nation, The New Yorker, and The New York Review of Books. He is the author of the novel All the Sad Young Literary Men.