Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

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“Oh Lord, give us the strength to survive the weariness of our lives.”

Voices from Chernobyl by Svetlana Alexievich

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I love oral histories. I’ll read them on any subject, even one I have no interest in. There’s just something about them that fascinates me. I love to hear all the different perspectives on the same topic. I’ve read sad oral histories before, but I’ve never read anything like Voices from Chernobyl. Voice from Chernobyl is hands down the saddest book I’ve ever read. “Sad” isn’t even the word. The grief flies right off the page and envelops you. It’s also incredibly moving and downright poetic. […]

If You’re Sick of Reading About Our Current Disaster, Try This One.

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

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Let’s distract ourselves from current disasters with even worse ones from the past, shall we? There are nor many single-event disasters with greater name recognition or cultural impact than the meltdown at Chernobyl—so much so, that it still shapes the zeitgeist around nuclear power 25 years after the event. Adam Higginbotham does an excellent job at detailing exactly how the world fell apart and the exact human cost. It certainly seemed like the end of the world for the town of Pripyat, which was built […]

Fascination into passion

Chernobyl 01:23:40 by Andrew Leatherbarrow

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If you’ve been watching HBO’s Chernobyl than you’ve probably jumped down the nuclear disaster rabbit hole, and you may be looking for something to explain the finer details of the disaster. If, like me, you’re a laymen and can understand the basics of the technology but not the specifics, than a lot of the books out there may be daunting. Maybe you want a more personal account, but you don’t want to pick up one of the 500-800 page tomes out there documenting survivor stories, […]



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