Midnight in Chernobyl

The Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster

By: Adam Higginbotham

Narrated by: Jacques Roy

One of AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of 2019!

A New York Times Best Book of the Year
A Time Best Book of the Year
A Kirkus Reviews Best Nonfiction Book of the Year
2020 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence Winner

From journalist Adam Higginbotham, the New York Times bestselling “account that reads almost like the script for a movie” (The Wall Street Journal)—a powerful investigation into Chernobyl and how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the history’s worst nuclear disasters.

Early in the morning of April 26, 1986, Reactor Number Four of the Chernobyl Atomic Energy Station exploded, triggering one of the 20th century’s greatest disasters. In the thirty years since then, Chernobyl has become lodged in the collective nightmares of the world: shorthand for the spectral horrors of radiation poisoning, for a dangerous technology slipping its leash, for ecological fragility, and for what can happen when a dishonest and careless state endangers its citizens and the entire world. But the real story of the accident, clouded from the beginning by secrecy, propaganda, and misinformation, has long remained in dispute.

Drawing on hundreds of hours of interviews conducted over the course of more than ten years, as well as letters, unpublished memoirs, and documents from recently-declassified archives, Adam Higginbotham brings the disaster to life through the eyes of the men and women who witnessed it firsthand. The result is a “riveting, deeply reported reconstruction” (Los Angeles Times) and a definitive account of an event that changed history: a story that is more complex, more human, and more terrifying than the Soviet myth.

“The most complete and compelling history yet” (The Christian Science Monitor), Higginbotham’s “superb, enthralling, and necessarily terrifying...extraordinary” (The New York Times) book is an indelible portrait of the lessons learned when mankind seeks to bend the natural world to his will—lessons which, in the face of climate change and other threats, remain not just vital but necessary.

Critic reviews

"Jacques Roy's nuanced performance of Higginbotham's harrowing audiobook keeps listeners deeply engaged. . . . Roy's masterful narration enhances this stark and terrifying account of one of the worst disasters in human history."

chilling

I really like this book it kept me listening all the way through it was very well organized and researched

A fantastic “page turner” from beginning to end!

Wow! What a great read. This book was truly a page turner from start to finish. What makes it very cool in that regard is that the entire book is fact, not fiction. The depth of information and the way it was presented was on believably informative and thoroughly entertaining. Definitely five stars!

Very good book

Very good writing. He found a way to explain even the most complicated details.

A Must Read

1) Fantastic narrator.
2). HBO tried but can’t match the candlepower of this book. The bloody, crushed bodies are people with names. The scared guy who studied nuclear science is cowed into the fear of losing a tenuous middle class life and pushes the red button, has a name. The lady who dies because she stayed behind to make hand-sketched maps which the government wouldn’t supply, has a name. Real people died because government wanted to put on a fake infallible Broadway show called, “nationalism. Oh and by the way, we’ll just hose everything down, shut off the news and hide for 20 years until the truth gets out.

amazing!!!

this book was very informational and educational, it is a deep inside look into tge chernobyl accident it is upsetting at times but very well written and narrated.