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An account of the worst nuclear reactor accident in history from the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

On April 26, 1986, the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown--from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster--and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Composed of interviews in monologue form, Voices from Chernobyl is a crucially important work of immense force, unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner.

Tabla de contenidos provista por Syndetics

• Translator's Preface(p. vii)
• Historical Note(p. 1)
• Prologue: A Solitary Human Voice(p. 5)
• Part 1 The Land of the Dead
• On Why We Remember(p. 25)
• About What Can Be Talked about with the Living and the Dead(p. 27)
• About a Whole Life Written down on Doors(p. 34)
• By Those Who Returned(p. 36)
• About What Radiation Looks Like(p. 50)
• About a Song without Words(p. 53)
• About a Homeland(p. 54)
• About How a Person Is Only Clever and Refined in Evil(p. 64)
• Soldiers' Chorus(p. 67)
• Part 2 The Land of the Living
• About Old Prophecies(p. 85)
• About a Moonlit Landscape(p. 88)
• About a Man Whose Tooth Was Hurting When He Saw Christ Fall(p. 90)
• About a Single Bullet(p. 96)
• About How We Can't Live without Chekhov and Tolstoy(p. 104)
• About War Movies(p. 109)
• A Scream(p. 118)
• About a New Nation(p. 119)
• About Writing Chernobyl(p. 126)
• About Lies and Truths(p. 133)
• People's Chorus(p. 143)
• Part 3 Amazed by Sadness
• About What We Didn't Know: Death Can Be So Beautiful(p. 155)
• About the Shovel and the Atom(p. 158)
• About Taking Measurements(p. 165)
• About How the Frightening Things in Life Happen Quietly and Naturally(p. 167)
• About Answers(p. 174)
• About Memories(p. 177)
• About Loving Physics(p. 179)
• About Expensive Salami(p. 185)
• About Freedom and the Dream of an Ordinary Death(p. 187)
• About the Shadow of Death(p. 193)
• About a Damaged Child(p. 197)
• About Political Strategy(p. 199)
• By a Defender of the Soviet Government(p. 205)
• About Instructions(p. 206)
• About the Limitless Power One Person Can Have over Another(p. 210)
• About Why We Love Chernobyl(p. 217)
• Children's Chorus(p. 221)
• A Solitary Human Voice(p. 225)
• In Place of an Epilogue(p. 239)

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

A chorus of fatalism, stoic bravery and black, black humor is sounded in this haunting oral history of the 1986 nuclear reactor catastrophe in what is now northeastern Ukraine. Russian journalist Alexievich records a wide array of voices: a woman who clings to her irradiated, dying husband though nurses warn her "that's not a person anymore, that's a nuclear reactor"; a hunter dispatched to evacuated villages to exterminate the household pets; soldiers sent in to clean up the mess, bitter at the callous, incompetent Soviet authorities who "flung us there, like sand on the reactor," but accepting their lot as a test of manhood; an idealistic nuclear engineer whose faith in communism is shattered. And there are the local peasants who take this latest in a long line of disasters in stride, filtering back to their homes to harvest their contaminated potatoes, shrugging that if they survived the Germans, they'll survive radiation. Alexievich shapes these testimonies into novelistic "monologues" that convey a vivid portrait of late-Communist malaise, in which bullying party bosses, paranoid propaganda and chaotic mobilizations are resisted with bleak sarcasm ("It wasn't milk, it was a radioactive byproduct"), mournful philosophizing ("[t]he mechanism of evil will work under conditions of apocalypse") and lots of vodka. The result is an indelible X-ray of the Russian soul. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Chernobyl is like the war of all wars. There's nowhere to hide. On April 26, 1986, the people of Belarus lost everything when a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station exploded. Many people died outright, and many were evacuated, forced to leave behind everything from pets to family photographs. Millions of acres remain contaminated, and thousands of people continue to be afflicted with diseases caused by radiation as 20 tons of nuclear fuel sit in a reactor shielded by a leaking sarcophagus known as the Cover. For three years, journalist Alexievich spoke with scores of survivors--the widow of a first responder, an on-the-scene cameraman, teachers, doctors, farmers, Party bureaucrats, a historian, scientists, evacuees, resettlers, grandmothers, mothers--and she now presents their shocking accounts of life in a poisoned world. And what quintessentially human stories these are, as each distinct voice expresses anger, fear, ignorance, stoicism, valor, compassion, and love. Alexievich put her own health at risk to gather these invaluable frontline testimonies, which she has transmuted into a haunting and essential work of literature that one can only hope documents a never-to-be-repeated catastrophe. --Donna Seaman Copyright 2005 Booklist

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Svetlana Alexievich was born in the Ukraine and studied journalism at the University of Minsk. Her books, including Voices from Chernobyl , document the emotional history of Soviet and post-Soviet life through interviews. Alexievich has received numerous awards for her writing, including a prize from the Swedish PEN Institute for "courage and dignity as a writer." She was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 2015 "for her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time."

Translator Keith Gessen was born in Russia and educated at Harvard. He is a founding editor of n+1 and has written about literature and culture for Dissent , The Nation , The New Yorker , and The New York Review of Books . He is the author of the novel A Terrible Country and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.