A thoughtful study of catastrophe, unintended consequences, and, likely, nuclear calamities to come.
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 Books
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.
A study of swimming as sport, survival method, basis for community, and route to physical and mental well-being.
For Bay Area writer Tsui (American Chinatown: A People's History of Five Neighborhoods, 2009), swimming is in her blood. As she recounts, her parents met in a Hong Kong swimming pool, and she often visited the beach as a child and competed on a swim team in high school. Midway through the engaging narrative, the author explains how she rejoined the team at age 40, just as her 6-year-old was signing up for the first time. Chronicling her interviews with scientists and swimmers alike, Tsui notes the many health benefits of swimming, some of which are mental. Swimmers often achieve the “flow” state and get their best ideas while in the water. Her travels took her from the California coast, where she dove for abalone and swam from Alcatraz back to San Francisco, to Tokyo, where she heard about the “samurai swimming” martial arts tradition. In Iceland, she met Guðlaugur Friðþórsson, a local celebrity who, in 1984, survived six hours in a winter sea after his fishing vessel capsized, earning him the nickname “the human seal.” Although humans are generally adapted to life on land, the author discovered that some have extra advantages in the water. The Bajau people of Indonesia, for instance, can do 10-minute free dives while hunting because their spleens are 50% larger than average. For most, though, it’s simply a matter of practice. Tsui discussed swimming with Dara Torres, who became the oldest Olympic swimmer at age 41, and swam with Kim Chambers, one of the few people to complete the daunting Oceans Seven marathon swim challenge. Drawing on personal experience, history, biology, and social science, the author conveys the appeal of “an unflinching giving-over to an element” and makes a convincing case for broader access to swimming education (372,000 people still drown annually).
An absorbing, wide-ranging story of humans’ relationship with the water.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-61620-786-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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