Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster Paperback – February 4, 2020

A gifted author who took a complex disaster and distilled it into an easily readable form. As intense as either of the the Space Shuttle disasters, where seconds and decisions count. The author carries the reader through the event and beyond, while including helpful diagrams of the plant, area and reactor. He lays bare the USSR's governmental machinations that "engendered a top-down culture of toadying yes-men who learned to anticipate the whims of their superiors and agree to whatever they said, while threatening their own underlings". A State that perpetuated a code "that bad things happen only outside of the Soviet Union" type of playbook, while indoctrinating its citizens of the nuclear age (pre-disaster) with "radiation is as safe as the jam you spread on your morning toast" type of misinformation. How the Soviet State classified the information that all of the RBMK reactors working throughout the entire Soviet Union had the same fatal flaw that if triggered, devastated the Chernobyl region for decades to come. All the while keeping the frightening truth of the disaster and it's severity from its own citizens and the world. Until the radiation spreading across the globe made the ruse impossible to perpetuate any farther. In 22 pages, Adam Higgenbotham takes us inside Hospital number 6 and details the heartbreaking destruction of the first responders. The firefighters (who were also never informed of the life threatening severity of radiation) and were vastly unprepared in gear and training for the extreme radiological environment of the fire at Chernobyl. Midnight in Chernobyl details the (at first) improving conditions of the firefighters and plant workers, then describes their bodies rapid plunge toward death. The book then takes us through the investigation and "trial" of the men the Soviet Union chose to pin it on, while assuring the Soviet State suffered not. For me it is worth reading again, as the style of the writing is gripping. I would Highly Recommend this book to anyone who is curious about the events at Chernobyl, as it does not disappoint. It is very informative and certainly an easy read (for those whom may think that this is too technical an issue).

I'll admit I haven't thought much about the subject since my second-grade classmates talked about it in hushed tones back in the early 90s, but the hype surrounding the new HBO/Sky miniseries has sent me down a Chernobyl rabbit hole over the last two weeks. It's been a rewarding, fascinating, and occasionally disturbing experience, and I'm glad I read this early on.Being the first full-length book I've ever read on Chernobyl, I'm happy to say this is a fairly easy read, and gripping for the most part. Adam Higginbotham has managed to cram in a huge number of viewpoints into less than 400 pages, including the perspectives of the plant workers, scientists, doctors, first responders, liquidators, ordinary civilians in Pripyat and the surrounding areas, and the Soviet elite making a godawful mess of everything from above. He's dug deep into obscure and recently declassified materials, revealing the true extent of the bad decision making that went on, and the institutional rot inherent in the Soviet system. He keeps things moving at a brisk pace and considering that I'm a slower reader than I used to be, I'm amazed I burned through it in only five days. I swear my heart was racing when Unit Four exploded, and I audibly groaned on a couple of occasions when a bad situation somehow managed to get worse. It's a case study in why dictatorships rarely last more than a few decades, or in the case of Russia, end up getting replaced with a different form of dictatorship. Gorbachev is one of the few figures who comes across as being even mildly sympathetic, if painfully naive, leaving the reader wondering exactly HOW he planned on "reforming" what essentially amounted to an 8.6 million square mile dumpster fire by that point.I'm surprised that some have criticized the level of technical detail in this book. The author has done a pretty good job explaining the history of nuclear power in the Soviet Union, how nuclear power plants operate, the many flaws inherent in the RBMK design, and what happened inside Unit Four the night of the fateful safety test. On a more frustrating level, he's also done an excellent job explaining how the decrepit, hidebound, ideologically rigid, and corrupt Soviet government turned a tragic industrial accident into a traumatic nightmare.This book also includes a large amount of supporting material not usually found in most popular histories. These include a list of the major players, maps of Pripyat and the surrounding area, diagrams of the plant and Unit Four, a lengthy bibliography, a glossary of terms, and a massive (130-page) section of footnotes. The Kindle version is generally well done, although there is the occasional typo and there are no links between the main text and the footnotes. On the negative side, the writing is sometimes rather clumsy, and while the Soviet bureaucracy deserves all the criticism it gets here, the amount of space the author devotes to criticizing an inhuman system has the ironic effect of sometimes distancing the reader from a tragedy that affected a lot of scared, confused, and yes, heroic, human beings.If you can stomach a few disturbing accounts of what radiation does to the human body, and some mildly technical descriptions of how nuclear power plants operate, this is a book that deserves to be read. It's not a flawless read, nor is it an anti-nuclear or anti-communist screed, but it's a darn good read nonetheless.

It’s not a short read by any means, but it’s surprisingly easy to get through. As someone who doesn’t speak Russian, I often find that books about Russia can get bogged down with names and terminology—but this one was really well done.I appreciated the author’s perspective and the way he wove in helpful context about Russian politics and historical details to orient readers like me—too young to remember this when it happened, but not young enough to have learned it in school.I’d definitely recommend this to anyone looking for a thoughtful dive into this period of Russian history, especially from the lens of nuclear power.

I haven't even finished this yet but it's a five star book. It tells the real life history of the why's, what's, how's etc of Chernobyl but it isn't a boring citation of facts but comes across as a catastrophic disaster thriller. As you read this you are holding your breath. It is that good.