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Midnight in Chernobyl  By  cover art

Midnight in Chernobyl

By: Adam Higginbotham
Narrated by: Jacques Roy
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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.

©2019 Adam Higginbotham (P)2019 Simon & Schuster
  • Unabridged Audiobook
  • Categories: History

What listeners say about Midnight in Chernobyl

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  • 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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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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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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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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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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18 people found this helpful

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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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17 people found this helpful

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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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15 people found this helpful

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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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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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8 people found this helpful

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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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8 people found this helpful