'Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster' by Adam Higgenbotham

Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, Adam Higgenbotham (5.0)

I found this book fascinating and essential if you are a human living on this earth! Full disclosure: I was a fan of nuclear power and I still am – if treated with the respect and safety it deserves – which clearly was not the case in Chernobyl.  Much of what I believed was true about the accident seems to be propaganda. As we move farther from the times of the USSR, more data became available.  Mr. Higgenbotham spent 10 years interviewing many of the original players in the event – or their families. Here the author has described a horrible, complicated disaster as a powerful story of the effect of science and politics tragically intertwined.  My reading of this book coincided with the recent (alleged) nuclear missile explosion that occurred in Russian. As with Chernobyl, the data coming from Russia concerning deaths and radiation levels changes daily. Interesting that the current regime in Russia has been known to harken back fondly to the good old days of the Soviet Union. Given what happened before, during and after the accident in Chernobyl, we should be worried.