I've made it my business to try and read a lot more adult non-fiction this year, purely because I'm too stuck in my ways with the choice of fiction reading material that crosses my bedside cabinet, and since signing up for the library service online, I've been able to loan books digitally for the first time on my kindle without having to swell Mr Bezos' bank account any further.
"Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy" throws you straight in at the deep end, starting out a mere few hours before the massive explosion that tore the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant apart, sending a colossal amount of radiation into the surrounding area and right across Northern Europe and beyond.
The book draws on data and eyewitness accounts, and it must have been exceedingly difficult to break through the silence and secrecy surrounding the disaster to gather such detailed information. The worst peacetime nuclear disaster in history mainly played out behind closed doors, despite the huge strides forward with Glasnost at the time under the premiership of Mikhail Gorbachev - a figure who does not come out favourably in the book's examination of the political and bureaucratic process that silenced the media from reporting on Chernobyl at the time.
For the population of nearby Prypiat, and within the ever-extending confines of the exclusion zone that was later rolled into operation around the stricken reactor, life seemed to continue as normal until the increased radiation took its toll on human life, first with those directly involved in dealing with the explosion and fire, and later for the general populace who were also kept in the dark as to the impact of the core exposure.
As with any well written and thoroughly researched non-fiction book, it's the human stories emerging from the tragedy that make for the most gripping parts of this story. The miraculous survival of the divers whose vital role in draining sub-surface water from the tunnels beneath the reactor may have saved many hundreds of thousands more lives, at risk from a secondary explosion, and the tragic consequences for those who were indirectly to blame for the sequence of events that led to the explosion, exposing a management work ethic in Russia that still exists to this day.
Serhii then begins to pick up the pieces, months and years after the initial tragedy, making this utterly gripping from start to finish - filling in many of the details that the TV adaptation didn't manage to cover in detail, but keeping facts brutally to the point and relevant to the struggle humanity still faces in its demand for limitless energy.
Unmissable stuff, one of the most affecting books I've read this year.
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