To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Chernobyl Children International and the Clean Futures Fund are two of the charities in this effort.

The men were oblivious to their lack of protection, which even if it had been available would not have saved them. It offers us a 360 degree view into the human dimension of a large-scale tragedy, not just in the immediate aftermath but in the unconscionable handling of the disaster through deliberate obfuscation and misinformation. Imagine that you are sitting at home, browsing through books on the internet, when you are told that you need to leave your home within the next two hours. Interviews with teachers, hunters, soldiers, clean-up workers, medics, a cameraman, a physicist and children provide diverse experiences from the days immediately following the disaster to the months and even years later when people were still getting sick. Like many others, he fought a nuclear disaster with no protective gear at all (it becomes clear elsewhere in the book that these first responders quite literally saved Europe—if the fire had spread to the other three reactors, the consequences would have been much worse).Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster ( Russian: Чернобыльская молитва, romanized: Chernobylskaya molitva, lit. It is timeless and has sparked so much thought about infinity, sacrifice, love and unspeakable grief. The authorial presence is invisible, except when she interviews herself on the significance of the disaster: “We cannot go on believing, like characters in a Chekhov play, that in a hundred years’ time mankind will be thriving,” she says, adding, “What lingers most in my memory of Chernobyl is life afterwards: the possessions without owners, the landscapes without people. While officials tried to hush up the accident, Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors - clean-up workers, residents, firefighters, resettlers, widows, orphans - crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love. Alexievich’s Nobel win was unexpected because her books are non-fiction, a kind of oral history (although as this New Republic article points out, she takes considerable liberties with the testimonies she collects).

The scale of the devastation and its insidious nature are perhaps beyond the power of the individual mind to imagine, which is one good reason why the polyphonic form Alexievich has made her own (and for which she won the Nobel prize for literature last year) is so appropriate. Svetlana Alexievich spent years collecting testimonies from survivors, crafting their voices into a haunting oral history of fear, anger and uncertainty, but also dark humour and love. The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. The American translation was awarded the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for general non-fiction.In Chernobyl Prayer each interview is usually a few pages long, and reads as a monologue – which is how they are described in the contents pages. People muse about mortality and time, quote Tolstoy and Andreyev, wonder about remembering and forgetting, and much more. Many of the over 500 interviewees were scientists or engineers who give clear, thoughtful, insightful explanations of what went wrong and why so many of the mitigation efforts were futile. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

The heroism of the firemen at Chernobyl, their pride and sense of duty, was in stark contrast to the cynical incompetence of the government. This masterly new translation by Anna Gunin and Arch Tait retains the nerve and pulse of the Russian, conveying the angst and confusion of the narrators -- Serguei Alex.Chernobyl Prayer is an oral history compiled by Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich from several years of interviews that she conducted among the people who experienced the nuclear accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant firsthand. A beautifully written book, it's been years since I had to look away from a page because it was just too heart-breaking to go on. Chernobyl Prayer was first published in Russian in 1997; a revised, updated edition was released in 2013.