Manual for Survival

A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

By: Kate Brown

Narrated by: Christina Delaine

Dear Comrades! Since the accident at the Chernobyl power plant, there has been a detailed analysis of the radioactivity of the food and territory of your population point. The results show that living and working in your village will cause no harm to adults or children.

So began a pamphlet issued by the Ukrainian Ministry of Health-which, despite its optimistic beginnings, went on to warn its readers against consuming local milk, berries, or mushrooms, or going into the surrounding forest. This was only one of many misleading bureaucratic manuals that, with apparent good intentions, seriously underestimated the far-reaching consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe.

After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between 31 and 54 people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone.

©2019 Kate Brown (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

Facts

Liked all of it …. Important, reliable information on nuclear hazards to people all over the world./

Detailed Study

While this book is neither a “manual for survival” nor “a Chernobyl guide to the future” it is well worth reading. It is a detailed study of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, the widespread negative direct and indirect impacts on countless people in Ukraine, Belarus, and beyond, and the systematic lies/denials/coverups/suppression by the Soviet Union and others throughout the world.

Enlightening

Important information in an easy to understand format. The writer is a good story teller.

Fantastic

I originally had to get this for class, but I got halfway through it and decided I also needed it on audible just for how good it was. Truly great book with a unique perspective, I’ve always thought science was immune to political influences but this book shows otherwise. Also with the increased connectivity of our world one thing that Brown does well is show how an issue in one corner of the world is not just isolated to that area but it impacts everyone, our foreign policy kind of blends into our domestic policy and vice versa.

Again fantastic book everyone not just those taking a Russian history course should read this!

Must read this timely book

This is well worth listening to. I can not recall a book that interviewed local fathers, mothers an elders about the toxic nuclear fallout and destruction that still exists today.