Midnight in Chernobyl
This will tell you almost more than you need to know about the disaster at Chernobyl in 1986. The level of detail in Adam Higginbotham’s account of the steps leading up to the explosion is, at times, overwhelming. Trying to keep track of it all requires concentration. A lot of it. I’m not trying to criticise this book. Far from it. Piers Paul Read’s Ablaze was – I think – the first account and was only limited by its proximity to the actual events. Serhii Plokhy’s Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy was more up to date but – for me, at least - dry and academic. No sense of the lives affected. Adam Higginbotham’s book, published in 2019, offers the fruits of access to a whole ocean of documents hitherto unreleased and is probably the most up to date and reliable telling of what happened before, during and in the years after the explosion. Despite the sometimes exhaustive – and exhausting – detail, it’s a compelling read. I learned a lot. But, here’s the thing. The one account of the disas...
