Midnight in Chernobyl

By: Adam Higginbotham

Narrated by: Jacques Roy

Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

One of AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of 2019!

The definitive, dramatic untold story of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, based on original reporting and new archival research.

April 25, 1986 in Chernobyl was a turning point in world history. The disaster not only changed the world’s perception of nuclear power and the science that spawned it, but also our understanding of the planet’s delicate ecology. With the images of the abandoned homes and playgrounds beyond the barbed wire of the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone, the rusting graveyards of contaminated trucks and helicopters, the farmland lashed with black rain, the event fixed for all time the notion of radiation as an invisible killer.

Chernobyl was also a key event in the destruction of the Soviet Union, and, with it, the United States’ victory in the Cold War. For Moscow, it was a political and financial catastrophe as much as an environmental and scientific one. With a total cost of 18 billion rubles - at the time equivalent to $18 billion - Chernobyl bankrupted an already teetering economy and revealed to its population a state built upon a pillar of lies.

The full story of the events that started that night in the control room of reactor number four of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant has never been told - until now. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, journalist Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story, including Alexander Akimov and Anatoli Dyatlov, who represented the best and worst of Soviet life; denizens of a vanished world of secret policemen, internal passports, food lines, and heroic self-sacrifice for the motherland.

Midnight in Chernobyl, award-worthy nonfiction that reads like sci-fi, shows not only the final epic struggle of a dying empire, but also the story of individual heroism and desperate, ingenious technical improvisation joining forces against a new kind of enemy.

©2019 Adam Higginbotham (P)2019 Simon & Schuster

Remembering The Time When...

I’m usually not into books of this sort because they tend to be long and drawn out and boring, especially when I remember when and how things happened and the stories that were kept “secret”.
Having grown up when hiding under your desks at school were thought to keep you safe and alive and part of every day life as practice with air raids was normal, this was another important event that children were not told...
I’m not a super intellectual woman, but I sat in bed one night with my earbuds in my ears, crocheting, making remarks so loud that my husband would often wake up and ask me to keep my remarks down because I kept waking him up.
This book kept me so interested that I “read” for over 6 hours straight away! He and I have had some interesting conversations and it just astounds me of the things that people have closed their eyes to...and how this can apply to things even today. Amazing! I have recommended this book to many people. It is a wonderful read once you get started. Some things are slow for some people, but I have always found science interesting anyways. My heart just goes out to all those involved...
I’m trying not to let “anything out of the bag”...enjoy the story...no, really!

A Scary Story

Its been a long time since a book has made me this scared. The Russians are acting like little boys while this terrible tragedy unfolds. The depth and breadth of this nuclear disaster unfold in intense realism. You will lose sleep thinking about how this will not go away and could have been a lot worse.

Blown away

A very interesting telling of this tragic accident. It was personal, not characters, but I felt like I got to know the people involved. And the voice of the narrator could not have been a better match to the story.

Not bad

Fascinating story but made difficult to follow by the rapidly switching perspectives of 30-50 different Russian/Ukrainian individuals involved in the story. Each time a new character is introduced it adds a layer of confusion as more and more individuals are introduced and then revisited. May be easier to follow or more appreciated in the written medium. Narrator was solid though.

Many lessons here

For those of us who work in larger businesses, we may have learned that knowledge without effective documentation, communication, training, and a desire to fully enunciate the rationale for decisions can cause problems in execution and operation. In the case of Chernobyl all of these problems were present and then the over-arching society and governmental influence further diminished the value of quality execution, knowledge transfer and good judgment (avoiding short-cuts).

This book brought all these issues to light along with the humanity of the people involved in the disaster and those impacted by the consequences of bad leadership and bad management/communications. Very well done book and audio presentation.

Fantastic Book/Show

The book is always better than the movie/tv show. It's just how it is. However, the show did a fantastic job summarizing all the trials and trivializations that occurred that fateful night and its aftermath. The author did an incredible job. The narrator nailed it. The book is long and sometimes difficult to follow with all the different Russian names and discerning who is who but you get the hang of it. I think the print version would've been nice to have just to cross reference who did what and when.

Loved it

Very engaging. Excellent storytelling. Enjoyed it all. Obviously a huge amount of research involved in preparation.

Best book on Chernobyl!!

This book is amazing! I was able to learn not only about the night of the nuclear disaster, but the many political and scientific elements that lead up to it.

Excellent Book

I became interested in this story after watching the HBO show Chernobyl. This book is a well written, well paced complete history from the very beginnings of the plant, the accident, and its aftermath. It has just enough detail to give the casual listener a vocabulary and understanding of the design issues and operator errors that led to the accident without being overly technical.

Intriguing & riveting; loved the scientific detail

Story kept me engaged throughout. Loved the attention to scientific detail. The narration was good.