A history of the nuclear disaster that set precedents—and standards—for future mishaps of the kind.
As Plokhy (Director, Ukrainian Research Institute, Harvard Univ.; Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation, 2017, etc.) writes, the Ukrainian city of Prypiat and the entire “exclusion zone” created after the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor on April 26, 1986, stand as a kind of living museum, a time capsule enshrining the communist era. In 2015, the Ukrainian government removed statues of Lenin and other communist leaders from the streets, but “the monument to Lenin still stands in the center of Chernobyl.” In other respects, Chernobyl requires a more forward-looking approach; when the plant’s core melted down, an army of engineers, laborers, soldiers, police officers, and specialists had to evacuate thousands of people and attempt to isolate the power plant. They did so by dropping thousands of tons of sand, digging diversion tunnels and dams, encasing structures in concrete, and, in the end, abandoning a huge swath of land to an irradiated nature. The immediate cause of the accident, Plokhy notes, was a scheduled test that went awry, but proximate causes included cost-cutting construction shortcuts and an overly ambitious production schedule that forced the machinery into failure-prone overextension. In older times, the event might have been buried away, though atmospheric monitors would have detected it beyond the Iron Curtain. But the Chernobyl disaster occurred during the rule of Mikhail Gorbachev during the time of perestroika, and Soviet scientists were able to take the advice of Western scientists, one of whom suggested “that children be given potassium iodide tablets” in the hope of containing radiation poisoning. The author concludes that even in the wake of Chernobyl, we have not gotten much better at containing meltdowns—consider Fukushima, still poisoning the Pacific—and need to cooperate to “strengthen international control over the construction and exploitation of nuclear power stations.”
A thoughtful study of catastrophe, unintended consequences, and, likely, nuclear calamities to come.Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5416-1709-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Basic
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Categories: HISTORY | SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY | MILITARY | WORLD | GENERAL HISTORY
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Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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A master storyteller’s character-driven account of a storied year in the American Revolution.
Against world systems, economic determinist and other external-cause schools of historical thought, McCullough (John Adams, 2001, etc.) has an old-fashioned fondness for the great- (and not-so-great) man tradition, which may not have much explanatory power but almost always yields better-written books. McCullough opens with a courteous nod to the customary villain in the story of American independence, George III, who turns out to be a pleasant and artistically inclined fellow who relied on poor advice; his Westmoreland, for instance, was a British general named Grant who boasted that with 5,000 soldiers he “could march from one end of the American continent to the other.” Other British officers agitated for peace, even as George wondered why Americans would not understand that to be a British subject was to be free by definition. Against these men stood arrayed a rebel army that was, at the least, unimpressive; McCullough observes that New Englanders, for instance, considered washing clothes to be women’s work and so wore filthy clothes until they rotted, with the result that Burgoyne and company had a point in thinking the Continentals a bunch of ragamuffins. The Americans’ military fortunes were none too good for much of 1776, the year of the Declaration; at the slowly unfolding battle for control over New York, George Washington was moved to despair at the sight of sometimes drunk soldiers running from the enemy and of their officers “who, instead of attending to their duty, had stood gazing like bumpkins” at the spectacle. For a man such as Washington, to be a laughingstock was the supreme insult, but the British were driven by other motives than to irritate the general—not least of them reluctance to give up a rich, fertile and beautiful land that, McCullough notes, was providing the world’s highest standard of living in 1776.
Thus the second most costly war in American history, whose “outcome seemed little short of a miracle.” A sterling account.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7432-2671-2
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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