A review by newishpuritan
Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy by Serhii Plokhy

3.0

This is clearly the result of a lot of work. Not only extensive and meticulous research, but the effort required to synthesise all this into a coherent narrative, with much attention paid to the scientific and political culture of the time. It also considers the long-term fallout of the disaster in the break-up of the Soviet Union and the formation of Ukraine as an independent state. If I was reviewing this for an academic journal I might give it a higher rating. But as a general reader, this was a little too dry in its tone and Olympian in its perspective. It starts off with a lengthy account of the 1986 Communist Party Congress, a couple of months before the disaster, and that seems symptomatic. There are lots of interesting individuals in the story of Chernobyl, but all of them struggle to impress themselves on the reader's imagination in this account.