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

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.

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.

Recommend to everyone

Great book, definitely gives great inside to what really happened during that horrible disaster. So much that the works didn’t know. Great book!

This is a great story about a bad situation

This is an excellent book. Lots of information about Chernobyl I never knew. Just when I thought the 80's were a better time in Russia I was wrong. Still the same state run issues. Lot's of good facts about the failed test and actual radiation exposure to workers and emergency personnel. I didn't know Europe was affected and potentially could have been uninhabitable if things got worse. Very scary game the Russians were playing there. Fine book. Highly recommended. Makes me want to go visit the tourist site now.

Enthralling episode of history

A tale told of the accident and the afteath told in a way that left me craving the next chapter. A great book & narration. Highly recommend it!

I'm glad I bought this.

A wonderful account of a tragedy and the details that brought it about. A great sequel to the HBO series.

Powerful book, I couldn't put it down

Finished listening to it in just a couple of intense days.
Even though I remembered the general outlines of the Chernobyl disaster, Higginbotham brings it too life through the portrayal of key players, major ones & minor ones, and with intelligible-to-the-layman explications of the technology involved & the Soviet political & industrial system.

Really enjoyable

I was interested in learning more and was not disappointed. Felt more like a novel than a history book. Very nice pacing, level of detail, understandable for those of us who are not nuclear physics.