Reviews

Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places by Andrew Blackwell

zeroone's review against another edition

adventurous informative inspiring medium-paced

4.0

Interesting "tourist guide" to the most polluted places on Earth. There's a good selection of locations from the Chernobyl zone to the waste whirls of the Pacific Ocean. I found the best story was left as the last one, as the author visited Delhi and the river of poop that flows through it. 

bosskii's review

2.0

My problem with this book was twofold. First, I bought it for Chernobyl and was quite saddened when it devolved in to pollution tourism that I didn't care to read about. All in all I liked maybe half of it. Second, the focus was a little too loose. The mix of personal items, hard facts and day in the life was both too much and too little. So I'm not saying you won't like it, just that in the end I really liked Andrew but kind of felt blah with his book.

sevenlefts's review against another edition

4.0

A humorous yet philosophical take on pollution and what it means to live with it. When I say humorous, I wouldn't exactly say funny. I did laugh out loud a few times -- let's just say I enjoy his sense of humor.

Blackwell visits some nasty places -- Chernobyl, the oil sands of northern Alberta, the refineries of Port Arthur, the Great Garbage Patch in the Pacific, Brazilian soy fields encroaching on rainforest, Chinese cities whose main industries are computer recycling and coal mining, and a putrid yet holy river in India.

In each of these places, Blackwell manages to find some beauty in the ugliness as well as encountering locals who are engaged in doing likewise. His focus isn't on how terrible these sites are -- that's obvious. Rather, he tries to find how these places might make us look at our own environments in new ways. For in most cases, even though these places might be far from us, we've all had our hands in their creation.

On page 226, Blackwell serves up the gist of his argument.

We also hold up these poster children—Linfen, Port Arthur, Chernobyl—to tell ourselves that the problems are over there. And we'd like to keep it that way. We’d like to keep a tidy bubble for ourselves, and draw a line around some trees, and declare no farther. That here, at least, inside this boundary, nature survives. As long as there is Yellowstone, we'll have a little something for what ails us. What a joke. So much of our environmental consciousness is just aesthetics, a simple idea of what counts as beautiful. But that love of beauty has a cost. It becomes a force for disengagement. Linfen is too foul to care about. Port Arthur is too gross.

So I love the ruined places. And sure, I love the pure ones too. But I hate the idea that there’s any difference. And I wish more people thought gross was beautiful. Because if it isn’t, then I’m not sure why we should care about a world with so much grossness in it.

hb_bookworm's review against another edition

3.0

a funky, meandering little book. I liked some of the conclusions he drew, but the book felt a little aimless at times -- you get the sense the author is lost in a lot of ways.

abbiewan_kenobi's review against another edition

adventurous funny informative lighthearted fast-paced

3.25

dobbydoo22's review against another edition

4.0

This book is very reminiscent of Bill Bryson's travel books, although Blackwell manages to seem less dour and more entertaining than Bryson despite the gravity of the topics that he addresses. He visits several different major industrial pollution sites across the world, and his approach is more to observe than to suggest solutions or action. It's an interesting strategy, and it allows him to interview people across a range of viewpoints about/roles in industry without putting their defenses up.

jetia13's review against another edition

4.0

This was an interesting spin on the travel/adventure writing genre that I love so much. Blackwell's personality and humor come through in a fun and not distracting manner. He also provides enough information so you feel like you're learning something, but not so much that it feels like work.

quietdomino's review against another edition

3.0

A little too much to read all at once, unless you are looking forward to decamping the earth in a spaceship, Wall-e style. Tone just this side of excessively wry.

koralleen's review

adventurous funny informative medium-paced

4.25

titanic's review against another edition

2.0

This book started off really interesting, but near the ending it lacked. It was still a good read, but I was more capable of putting it down without wondering what was going to happen next. However, I did enjoy the authors way of writing, and all the running jokes he included, like how he referred to things as the size of Texas and the people screaming AUGHHHH!

I really wish I could say more about it, but nothing really comes to mind. It wasn't enjoyable, more okay. I stopped reading it completely for a few days and that didn't bother me. I was expecting more from this book, and considering it's got Chernobyl in the title, I imagined more than a chapter on the place. Shame.