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Midnight in Chernobyl
- Narrated by: Jacques Roy
- Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins
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Publisher's summary
One of AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of 2019!
The definitive, dramatic untold story of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, based on original reporting and new archival research.
April 25, 1986 in Chernobyl was a turning point in world history. The disaster not only changed the world’s perception of nuclear power and the science that spawned it, but also our understanding of the planet’s delicate ecology. With the images of the abandoned homes and playgrounds beyond the barbed wire of the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone, the rusting graveyards of contaminated trucks and helicopters, the farmland lashed with black rain, the event fixed for all time the notion of radiation as an invisible killer.
Chernobyl was also a key event in the destruction of the Soviet Union, and, with it, the United States’ victory in the Cold War. For Moscow, it was a political and financial catastrophe as much as an environmental and scientific one. With a total cost of 18 billion rubles - at the time equivalent to $18 billion - Chernobyl bankrupted an already teetering economy and revealed to its population a state built upon a pillar of lies.
The full story of the events that started that night in the control room of reactor number four of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant has never been told - until now. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, journalist Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story, including Alexander Akimov and Anatoli Dyatlov, who represented the best and worst of Soviet life; denizens of a vanished world of secret policemen, internal passports, food lines, and heroic self-sacrifice for the motherland.
Midnight in Chernobyl, award-worthy nonfiction that reads like sci-fi, shows not only the final epic struggle of a dying empire, but also the story of individual heroism and desperate, ingenious technical improvisation joining forces against a new kind of enemy.
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Beware limitations of the reader
- By JFanson on 01-01-19
By: Richard Rhodes
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Black Snow
- Curtis LeMay, the Firebombing of Tokyo, and the Road to the Atomic Bomb
- By: James M. Scott
- Narrated by: L.J. Ganser
- Length: 12 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Seven minutes past midnight on March 10, 1945, nearly 300 American B-29s thundered into the skies over Tokyo. Their payloads of incendiaries ignited a firestorm that reached up to 2,800 degrees, liquefying asphalt and vaporizing thousands; sixteen square miles of the city were flattened and more than 100,000 men, women, and children were killed. Black Snow is the story of this devastating operation, orchestrated by Major General Curtis LeMay, who famously remarked: "If we lose the war, we'll be tried as war criminals."
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Top notch!
- By anonymous on 10-24-22
By: James M. Scott
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33 Men
- Inside the Miraculous Survival and Dramatic Rescue of the Chilean Miners
- By: Jonathan Franklin
- Narrated by: Armando Valdez Kennedy
- Length: 7 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Having had unparalleled access to the Chilean mine disaster, award-winning journalist Jonathan Franklin takes readers to the heart of a remarkable story of human endurance, survival, and historic heroism. 33 Men is the groundbreaking, authoritative account of the Chilean mine disaster, one of the longest human entrapments in history.
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Excellent
- By James on 11-23-15
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Atoms and Ashes
- A Global History of Nuclear Disasters
- By: Serhii Plokhy
- Narrated by: Leighton Pugh
- Length: 12 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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Atoms and Ashes recounts the dramatic history of nuclear accidents that have dogged the industry in its military and civil incarnations since the 1950s. Through the stories of six terrifying major incidents—Bikini Atoll, Kyshtym, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima—Cold War expert Serhii Plokhy explores the risks of nuclear power, both for military and peaceful purposes, while offering a vivid account of how individuals and governments make decisions under extraordinary circumstances.
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This was a pretty sensational and biased book.
- By J. Seawright on 06-11-22
By: Serhii Plokhy
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Dark Tide
- The Great Boston Molasses Flood of 1919
- By: Stephen Puleo
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 9 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Around noon on January 15, 1919, a group of firefighters were playing cards in Boston's North End when they heard a tremendous crash. It was like, "a roaring surf," one of them said later. Like, "a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence," said another. A third firefighter jumped up from his chair to look out a window - "Oh my God!" he shouted to the other men, "Run!" A 50-foot-tall steel tank filled with 2.3 million gallons of molasses had just collapsed on Boston's waterfront, disgorging its contents as a 15-foot-high wave of molasses that at its outset traveled at 35 miles an hour.
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INTERESTING STORY - ABOUT 2x TOO LONG
- By The Louligan on 09-07-14
By: Stephen Puleo
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Chasing Heisenberg
- The Race for the Atom Bomb
- By: Michael Joseloff
- Narrated by: Malcolm Hillgartner
- Length: 3 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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After a devastating run of German victories, Allied troops are beginning to halt Hitler’s advance. But far from the battlefields, Allied scientists are struggling. Intelligence reports put them a distant second behind the Germans in a competition that could determine the outcome of the war: the race to build the world’s first nuclear weapon. For the Allies’ top scientists, the race is deeply personal. J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, and Samuel Goudsmit have known Hitler’s chief atomic scientist, Werner Heisenberg, for years.
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A Good Overview/Introduction to the Bomb Race
- By Ashlyn on 08-05-20
By: Michael Joseloff
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Lab 257
- The Disturbing Story of the Government's Secret Germ Laboratory
- By: Michael Christopher Carroll
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 13 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Strictly off limits to the public, Plum Island is home to virginal beaches, cliffs, forests, ponds - and the deadliest germs that have ever roamed the planet. Lab 257 blows the lid off the stunning true nature and checkered history of Plum Island. It shows that the seemingly bucolic island in the shadow of New York City is a ticking biological time bomb that none of us can safely ignore.
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More Politics Than Science
- By A Customer on 05-26-17
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109 East Palace
- Robert Oppenheimer and the Secret City of Los Alamos
- By: Jennet Conant
- Narrated by: Anne Twomey
- Length: 5 hrs and 57 mins
- Abridged
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They were told as little as possible. Their orders were to go to Santa Fe, New Mexico, and report for work at a classified Manhattan Project site, a location so covert it was known to them only by the mysterious address: 109 East Palace.
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Great Listen
- By John H. Davis III on 10-22-05
By: Jennet Conant
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The Winter Fortress: The Epic Mission to Sabotage Hitler's Atomic Bomb
- By: Neal Bascomb
- Narrated by: Chris Sorensen
- Length: 14 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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It's 1942 and the Nazis are racing to be the first to build a weapon unlike any known before. They have the physicists, they have the uranium, and now all their plans depend on amassing a single ingredient: heavy water, which is produced in Norway's Vemork, the lone plant in all the world that makes this rare substance. Under threat of death, Vemork's engineers push production into overdrive. For the Allies, the plant must be destroyed.
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Needs a different narrator!!!!
- By Scott on 06-04-16
By: Neal Bascomb
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Meltdown
- Nuclear Disaster and the Human Cost of Going Critical
- By: Joel Levy
- Narrated by: Kris Dyer
- Length: 12 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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From the pioneers of Los Alamos who got up close and personal with the cores of atomic bombs, to the hapless engineers in Soviet fuel-processing plants who unwittingly mixed up a disaster in a bucket, and from the terrifying impact of a tsunami at Fukushima to the mystery of the recent Russian incident, Meltdown explores the past and future of this extraordinary and potentially lethal source of infinite power
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A less well written version of another book
- By Amazon Customer on 01-10-22
By: Joel Levy
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Red Moon Rising
- Sputnik and the Hidden Rivals That Ignited the Space Age
- By: Matthew Brzezinski
- Narrated by: Charles Stransky
- Length: 11 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
On October 4, 1957, a time of Cold War paranoia, the Soviet Union secretly launched the Earth's first artificial moon. No bigger than a basketball, the tiny satellite was powered by a car battery. Yet, for all its simplicity, Sputnik stunned the world.
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awesome
- By Thomas on 06-25-09
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102 Minutes
- The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers
- By: Jim Dwyer, Kevin Flynn
- Narrated by: Ron McLarty
- Length: 5 hrs and 58 mins
- Abridged
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At 8:46 a.m. on September 11, 2001, 14,000 people were inside the twin towers; reading e-mails, making trades, eating croissants at Windows on the World. Over the next 102 minutes, each would become part of a drama for the ages, one witnessed only by the people who lived it, until now.
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102 Minutes--A Review
- By Leadinglove421 on 02-13-05
By: Jim Dwyer, and others
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In the early hours of the morning of April 26, 1986, the nuclear reactor at the Chernobyl power plant in Ukraine exploded, unleashing a storm of radioactive material into the atmosphere and contaminating most of Europe with its fallout. It was a disaster on an unprecedented scale.
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Engaging and thought-provoking.
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On January 28, 1986, just seventy-three seconds into flight, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven people on board. Millions of Americans witnessed the tragic deaths of a crew including New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe. Like the assassination of JFK, the Challenger disaster is a defining moment in 20th century history—one that forever changed the way America thought of itself and its optimistic view of the future. Yet the full story of what happened, and why, has never been told. Until now.
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Chernóbil, 1986. «Cierra las ventanillas y acuéstate. Hay un incendio en la central. Vendré pronto.» Esto fue lo último que un joven bombero dijo a su esposa antes de acudir al lugar de la explosión. No regresó. Y en cierto modo, ya no volvió a verle, pues en el hospital su marido dejó de ser su marido. Todavía hoy ella se pregunta si su historia trata sobre el amor o la muerte.
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Outstanding read, outstanding listen/Extraordinario trabajo literario y extraordinario audiolibro
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On September 17, 1961, Dag Hammarskjöld boarded a Douglas DC6 propeller plane on the sweltering tarmac of the airport in Leopoldville, the capital of the Congo. Hours later, he would be found dead in an African jungle with an ace of spades playing card placed on his body. Hammarskjöld had been the head of the United Nations for nine years. He was legendary for his dedication to peace on Earth.
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Name pronunciation
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When asked to name the world’s first major nuclear accident, most people cite the Three Mile Island incident or the Chernobyl disaster. Revealed in this book is one of American history’s best-kept secrets: the world’s first nuclear reactor accident to claim fatalities happened on United States soil. Chronicled here for the first time is the strange tale of SL-1, a military test reactor located in Idaho’s Lost River Desert that exploded on the night of January 3, 1961, killing the three-man maintenance crew on duty.
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Two decades ago, British Petroleum, a venerable and storied corporation, was running out of oil reserves. Along came a new CEO of vision and vast ambition, John Browne, who pulled off one of the greatest corporate turnarounds in history. BP bought one company after another and then relentlessly fired employees and cut costs. It skipped safety procedures, pumped toxic chemicals back into the ground, and let equipment languish, even while Browne claimed a new era of environmentally sustainable business as his own. For a while the strategy worked....
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It began with plutonium, the first element ever manufactured in quantity by humans. Fearing that the Germans would be the first to weaponize the atom, the United States marshaled brilliant minds and seemingly inexhaustible bodies to find a way to create a nuclear chain reaction of inconceivable explosive power. In a matter of months, the Hanford nuclear facility was built to produce and weaponize the enigmatic and deadly new material that would fuel atomic bombs.
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Lacking in many aspects
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The Manhattan Project
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This book traces the history of the Manhattan Project, from the first glimmerings of the possibility of such a catastrophic weapon to the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It profiles the architects of the bomb, including J. Robert Oppenheimer, and how they tried to reconcile their personal feelings with their ambition as scientists. It looks at the role of the politicians and it includes first-hand accounts of those who experienced the effects of the bombings.
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Very informative!
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What listeners say about Midnight in Chernobyl
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- NH
- 03-21-19
Midnight in Chernobyl is the book to listen to.
I have been interested in the Chernobyl incident since it first occurred. My interest came from living less than 15 miles SW of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant at the time of that accident. Chernobyl was so much more than what was reported at the time because of the USSR secrecy. I have attempted to read or listen to one or two other books on Chernobyl. Higginbotham's is the one I finished and finished in a few days. The information is presented chronologically. People are identified with their name and their position in relation to the disaster. The book gives a short history of the USSR Nuclear history, including the other accidents that were never disclosed to the USSR populace. It also traces what happened to the people involved in Chernobyl in the months and years after. The author spoke to several survivors or family members as recently as a few years ago. Jacques Roy does a fantastic job narrating the book. He handles the Russian vocabulary with ease. This book is informative. It is by turns angering and heartbreaking. Midnight in Chernobyl is the book to read or listen to about the Chernobyl disaster.
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133 people found this helpful
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- Christopher
- 03-22-19
This is a profoundly scary book
The story of the disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in 1986 is one that rhymes with other chronicles of human disaster, such as the Challenger and Columbia shuttle disasters. In each of these stories, a constellation of institutional inadequacy, human error, heroism and the distortions of after-action investigations to serve institutional needs become the bones that are dressed out by accounts of terrible events that leave a thoughtful reader haunted by questions of how we allowed things to get to the point where people died.
Midnight in Chernobyl is a deft and powerful example of this genre of investigative writing. The book weaves the personal stories of those who lived through the horror of the accident with the story of how political considerations contributed to the conditions that led to it. The author also makes sure to highlight the heroism of relatively unknown men and women who sought to mitigate the disaster, to save lives, often at the cost of their own. The ticktock of what happened gives way at times to utterly haunting descriptions of the extreme phenomena that occurred at the epicenter of a nuclear catastrophe.
Midnight in Chernobyl leaves the reader with many questions about how we manage societies, large scientific projects and how we live in the world that are as apposite now as they were in 1986.
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45 people found this helpful
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- R. C. Kahrl
- 04-19-19
Gripping non-fiction technological thriller
This minute-by-minute account of the Chernobyl disaster, when a huge nuclear reactor went out of control in a couple of seconds, after several errors of mismanagement by a complacent night shift staff, makes a fascinating account of the clash between the need for science to publicize its failures as well as successes, and the need of the Soviet government to maintain the fiction that Central Management of the nation has created and maintained a mistake-proof society. I especially liked the way that this narrator maintains an even, steady and clear verbal recitation of this disaster in the face of one terrible incident after another. The author goes back to the beginning of the nuclear age in the USSR, showng how the demands of the regime for ever-bigger projects and the concomitant demands to show the West that the USSR can build everything bigger, faster and with more advanced technology, led to a series of bad decisions in developing civilian nuclear power resulting in dangerous reactors and inadequate disaster planning. The KGB and other organs of secrecy and disinformation concealed every nuclear incident so that relevant scientific and engineering people never learned from the mistakes that were being made, because mistakes were by definition impossible, therefore suppressed. So when the Chernobyl reactor disintegrated in an instant, at first nobody in the scientific community could believe what had happened. After the reactor exploded, it took days for the Politiburo in Moscow to get even partial accurate information about what had happened, since the entire bureaucratic system had been conditioned to suppress bad facts at every turn, even when reporting to superiors. Meanwhile, radiation poisoning was spreading to a broader population as the days turned into weeks. The people living in the most dangerous areas never did learn the truth of what happened. Although the book is written in matter-of-fact reporting, the tension brought forward by recitation of the facts makes this book into a real page-turner. I listened to this book in the car, and often sat in the garage after arriving home because I just couldn't stop listening.
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40 people found this helpful
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- Xxxxxx xaxxxxx
- 02-22-19
A sad tale, well told.
A great story, terrible, but great. In-depth and riveting, I had a hard time walking away from it. An important lesson about the importance of transparency and motivation.
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24 people found this helpful
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- Krista Abels
- 04-16-19
Wow, What a Listen!
I pre-ordered this book on a whim, having a curiosity about the Chernobyl disaster. I have a strict rule with myself about my new Audible books being listened to only in my car, so it about KILLED me every time I had to stop my car because this book really sucked me in. There were so many details that I didn't know and the author just kept feeding my insatiable curiosity! I highly recommend this book to anyone with any curiosity about the Chernobyl disaster and the people (and politics) surrounding it!!!
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- Blackjack
- 05-28-19
Remembering The Time When...
I’m usually not into books of this sort because they tend to be long and drawn out and boring, especially when I remember when and how things happened and the stories that were kept “secret”.
Having grown up when hiding under your desks at school were thought to keep you safe and alive and part of every day life as practice with air raids was normal, this was another important event that children were not told...
I’m not a super intellectual woman, but I sat in bed one night with my earbuds in my ears, crocheting, making remarks so loud that my husband would often wake up and ask me to keep my remarks down because I kept waking him up.
This book kept me so interested that I “read” for over 6 hours straight away! He and I have had some interesting conversations and it just astounds me of the things that people have closed their eyes to...and how this can apply to things even today. Amazing! I have recommended this book to many people. It is a wonderful read once you get started. Some things are slow for some people, but I have always found science interesting anyways. My heart just goes out to all those involved...
I’m trying not to let “anything out of the bag”...enjoy the story...no, really!
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- Mike
- 04-21-19
Amazing Book
I am old enough to remember this disaster. However, like many in the West I only gave it passing attention at the time. The author did a great job of putting together an excellent chronology of the events leading up to the disaster, the actual events of the the day, and then the extensive aftermath via great research and interviews. I found the author's telling of the stories of the people involved to be the best aspect of the book. He put a real human face on it. The thousands of people who worked risking and often giving their lives to contain the disaster, are real heroes the world should know about.
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- Stuart Woodward
- 02-21-19
A detailed account of the Chernobyl accident
A detailed account of the Chernobyl accident and the aftermath.
I found the story of the individual members a little confusing because of the large number of Russian names. I think this may be easier to follow with text. The story was compelling and I learnt a lot of new details about the accident which I thought I was familiar with before.
The most interesting revelations for me were the details of the design of the reactor and how unstable it was under certain circumstances. I had assumed operator error but there were scenarios where the reaction could become unstable under fairly normal operation. Even the operators knew it was treacherous compared to other reactors that they had worked on.
Coverups, corruption, bad design, bad workmanship all played a part. Over all it is a good read for both pro and antinuclear readers as the dangers are well explained.
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- Anonymous User
- 03-23-19
Frightening
One of the most frightening books I've ever read. The arrogance and stupidity that lead to so many deaths is almost as scary as the accident itself.
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- Kathleen Freeland
- 02-18-19
So the truth is revealed
This book is very interesting especially for bringing to light concealed facts and the progress up to date.
Narrator has the perfect voice for this history lesson
The book is well written
I shall find more books by both author and narrator
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