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Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future Kindle Edition
by Kate Brown (Author) Format: Kindle Edition
4.6 out of 5 stars 144 ratings
The official death toll of the 1986 Chernobyl accident, 'the worst nuclear disaster in history', is only 54, and stories today commonly suggest that nature is thriving there. Yet award-winning historian Kate Brown uncovers a much more disturbing story, one in which radioactive isotopes caused hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the magnitude of the disaster has been actively suppressed.
For years after, Soviet scientists, bureaucrats and civilians were documenting staggering increases in birth defects, child mortality, cancers and other life-altering diseases. Worried that this evidence would blow the lid on the effects of radiation release from Cold War weapons-testing, scientists and diplomats from international organizations, including the UN, tried to bury or discredit it. Brown also encounters many everyday heroes, often women, who fought to bring attention to the ballooning human and ecological catastrophe, and adapt to life in a post-nuclear landscape, where the dangerous effects of radiation persist today.
Based on a decade of archival and on-the-ground research, Manual for Survival is a gripping historical detective story that brings to light the real consequences of Chernobyl - and the plot to cover them up.
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Print length
411 pages
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"[A] humane and strange book about the irreversible things a technological disaster does to people and landscapes."-- " New Statesman"
"A gripping book part scientific exploration, part Cold War thriller...Brown's in-depth research and clean, concise writing illuminate the reality behind decades of 'half-truths and bald-faced lies.'-- "Publishers Weekly (starred review)"
"A magisterial blend of historical research, investigative journalism and poetic reportage...an awe-inspiring journey."-- "The Economist"
"Brown is interested in the aftermath of Chernobyl, not the disaster itself. Her heroes are not first responders but brave citizen-scientists, independent-minded doctors and health officials, journalists, and activists who fought doggedly to uncover the truth."-- "New York Review of Books"
"Brown's page-turner skillfully weaves an original narrative on the long-term medical effects of the Chernobyl disaster."-- "Nature"
"Explosive, exquisitely researched...Brown's prose is sometimes technical but largely accessible and even turns poetic when she describes changed lives...This sobering book should be read--and studied--by policymakers and citizens...to spark a renewed debate over nuclear power."-- "Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"
"There have been several good books recently about Chernobyl...Brown wants to examine the present and the science around it...[and] she makes her case comprehensible to the general reader."-- "The Times (London)"
"This engagingly written book reads like a cold war thriller and uncovers the devastating effects of one of the world's worst nuclear disasters."-- "Alison MacFarlane, director, Institute for International Science and Technology Policy, George Washington University" --This text refers to the audioCD edition.
About the Author
Kate Brown is an award-winning historian of environmental and nuclear history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her book Plutopia won seven academic prizes, and Manual for Survival was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award.
Christina Delaine is an AudioFile Earphones Award-winning narrator and accomplished stage actress. Her theater credits include Jewtopia, the longest-running comedy in Off-Broadway history, and the title role in Antigone at both Portland Center Stage and Kentucky Repertory Theatre. She holds a BA degree from Dartmouth College and an MFA in acting from Brown University.--This text refers to the audioCD edition.
Product details
ASIN : B07GR9BXXS
Publisher : Penguin (March 12, 2019)
Publication date : March 12, 2019
Language : English
File size : 3241 KB
Text-to-Speech : Enabled
Screen Reader : Supported
Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
X-Ray : Not Enabled
Word Wise : Enabled
Print length : 411 pages
Lending : Not Enabled
Best Sellers Rank: #2,307,968 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
#443 in Nuclear Physics (Kindle Store)
#823 in Environmental Pollution Engineering
#1,596 in Public Health (Kindle Store)
Customer Reviews:
4.6 out of 5 stars 144 ratings
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Top reviews from the United States
Eric Meyer
2.0 out of 5 stars Good read, but perhaps should be placed in the fiction sectionReviewed in the United States on April 3, 2019
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Kate Brown's book is extremely well written. The problem is that the points she makes ignore the best science available from hundreds of peer-reviewed papers and instead defer to life-long anti-nuclear crusaders like Helen Caldicott.
She ignores all the measurements conducted in the years after the accident both in the former Soviet countries and abroad, and unquestioningly trusts some researchers, while being deeply skeptical of others.
Chernobyl was a tragedy-- but not for the reasons Brown asserts. It was a tragedy instead, because if we had continued to build nuclear plants at the rates we did in the late 70s and early 80s, much more of the world would be have clean electricity grids like France, Sweden, and Ontario do. Our chances at limiting global warming to 1.5C would be much better than they are.
"Brown takes the views of the ‘usual suspects’ into account, but dismisses mainstream science where there is peer review, and accountability. The 'usual suspects' tell a good story – but without a shred of evidence from studies that are appropriately powered and controlled for confounders."
- Dr. Geraldine Thomas, professor of pathology at Imperial College London, Founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank
Having reviewed hours of Dr. Helen Caldicott lectures, I know that she is not a source of accurate information. And Manual for Survival, once past the Chernobyl retelling, and past Brown's own interviews with Liquidators, takes the Caldicott approach of questioning motivations, making poor assumptions about research practices, and the making of untrue statements which could easily have been fact-checked.
"I was further shocked to read in this Chernobyl book Brown’s bald statement that radiation is the only known cause of myeloid leukemia, in the context clearly implying (wrongly) that there are no other causes."
- Jim Smith
"There have been many very careful studies conducted at huge expense over many years and it is a shame that she dismisses these and concentrates on contentious studies carried out by others that are not highly regarded within their own community."
- Dr. Geraldine Thomas
"Brown claims that the evidence collected and assembled by Greenpeace is more reliable than the evidence collected by hundreds of scientists working under the auspices of the UN and other international agencies."
- Michael Shellenberger
I've personally seen Dr. Helen Caldicott and Greenpeace make flat-out untrue statements regarding nuclear power. If Kate Brown wishes to "present both sides" and let the reader decide who is more credible, that is certainly one approach to writing a book. But only the Caldicott assumptions of Chernobyl's impact are fully articulated in Manual For Survival.
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Derek
1.0 out of 5 stars Misguided at bestReviewed in the United States on March 14, 2019
There is a tremendous amount of information and studies that are ignored and some very basic errors that would embarrass a physics freshman to make.
Take this for example:
"Now, for reasons they do not fully understand, researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy estimate that the period for half of cesium-137 to disappear from Chernobyl forests will be between 180 and 320 years.² That means the berries the pickers were selling on the road would be nearly as radioactive now as they were a couple of decades ago."
The author here cites Wired, of all places (the article is 'Chernobyl Exclusion Zone Radioactive Longer Than Expected'). My bet is that the article's mention of 180 to 320 years should have been in reference to cesium in general (as that's the only thing that makes sense). In 30.2 years half the Cs-137 is now barium for goodness' sake! Even if it never left biological creatures at all it'll still decay! In 320 years less than 1/1000 of the original Cs-137 will remain, a far cry from HALF. In my opinion this is a terrific mistake that could only be made by someone who doesn't know the very basics about this topic.
For the record I calculated that a 320 year ecological half-life for Cs-137 gives an "effective" half-life of 27.6 years.
Edit:
Before purchasing I recommend reading Jim T. Smith's review of this book for an alternate perspective.
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Cynthia Folkers
5.0 out of 5 stars Espcially important for the archival information it revealsReviewed in the United States on May 1, 2019
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I have researched Chernobyl radiation's chronic, low-dose health impacts for decades. I always wondered what happened to the data collected at the local and regional level in the FSS. Now I know at least part of the answer thanks to Kate Brown's book. The data were "disappeared" both by Soviet structures and by Western scientists. Whole databases went missing as did tissue samples. Scientists were jailed. And we are left with the half-formed narrative we have today on Chernobyl.
Increases of childhood leukemia (Switzerland) and impaired neural development and lowered IQ (Sweden and Norway) are just some of the low-dose legacies Chernobyl has left us. Imagine what is happening in areas in the FSS. Unfortunately, we will have to imagine in some instances. And Kate Brown's book reveals, in part, why.
Unlike other posters who rated this one star and are nuclear power proponents, I will tell you who I am.
Cindy Folkers, Radiation and Health Specialist, Beyond Nuclear
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Wizard
1.0 out of 5 stars Predictable and disappointing contentReviewed in the United Kingdom on March 20, 2019
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The author's stated aim is:
"to come to a more certain number describing the damage the [Chernobyl] accident caused and a clearer grasp of the medical and environmental effects of the disaster" (page 3, paragraph 3.)
But what is presented is a highly personalized account of an attempt to justify her thesis that low-level radiation is far more harmful than is thought by scientists working in the field. Specifically, if Kate Brown is correct, the guidelines promulgated by the independent International Commission on Radiological Protection are comprehensively wrong.
The book is likely to appeal to those who already hold views similar to Professor Brown's.
But if all the book does is to confirm a particular set of people in their firmly held beliefs, does this matter? The answer is yes, because the evidence from big nuclear accidents is that governments handle such events badly and we need to do better in the future.
Recent independent studies show that the mismanagement at Chernobyl and Fukushima was not because the risks of nuclear radiation were downplayed but because a mixture of fear and ignorance caused the authorities to overreact and relocate far too many people in an attempt to show that something was being done.
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Lara
5.0 out of 5 stars We should probably all be very worriedReviewed in the United Kingdom on July 20, 2019
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I suppose everyone knows virtually everything about the Chernobyl accident these days, I sure thought I did: I've been obsessed with it since it happened when I was a child. But a lot of people - myself included - probably aren't aware of what happened AFTER, and indeed what is happening still, because Chernobyl isn't over for us yet. That's the main focus of this book: if you want to learn about the actual Chernobyl accident there are plenty of good books about that, but what this book focuses on is what happened After. It's not flashy, it's clearly been a long slog for the author to dig up the history - in some cases she was the first western researcher to access some of the archives - but I couldn't put it down and the depth of the research is really impressive.
We tend to think of events like Chernobyl, Fukushima and nuclear bomb testings as single points in history, but the author is suggesting we should instead recognise them for what they are: part of a larger tapestry which, when viewed as a whole, is actually quite terrifying. According to the author, sixty-six nuclear accidents occurred in Ukraine alone in the year after Chernobyl blew, by way of example. The book doesn't stop at Chernobyl either, exploring what the author describes as a "blanketing" of the entire northern hemisphere by nuclear fallout due to nuclear tests and accidents of which Chernobyl is just a piddly one. The author asserts, for example, that fallout of radioactive iodine from atmospheric detonations of nuclear bombs in Nevada dwarfed Chernobyl emissions three times over. Let that sink in.
As the book explains so eloquently, industry accidents are difficult and expensive to clean up. And the alternative is what we are living with after Chernobyl: An alarming litany of catastrophic incompetence and disingenuousness by governments (quelle surprise) and international organisations including the UN and WHO (organisations I suspect many of us have naively trusted... right up until about halfway through this book, I suspect). They haven't exactly covered themselves in glory: the author's description of how UN, EU and US agencies actively worked to downplay and diminish research which suggests the aftermath of Chernobyl was worse and wider than previously thought, leaves the reader coldly horrified. The book raises concerns about a complete lack of understanding in these organisations of the health effects of long term exposure to chronic low levels of radiation, and an unwillingness to learn.
The book mentions one incident where European Economic Community agreed to buy a disputed shipment of contaminated wheat after the Chernobyl incident, which they then mixed with clean grain and shipped to Africa and East Germany as aid. With friends like these, we hardly need enemies.
If this book is even half correct, we should all be very worried.
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Jeffrey C.
4.0 out of 5 stars Very in depth view of the consequences of ChernobylReviewed in the United Kingdom on November 12, 2021
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I appreciated that during this disaster that the Russians had covered up the true facts of what was happening at Chernobyl. You don't need more than one brain cell to work this out for yourself. But that's the Russian government for you, very little interest in the deaths of their own people, let alone the rest of the world, they have a history of it. At least this splendid book has revealed the downright lies and half-truths. These poor people caught up by these10 rate, 'let us hope it works'. nuclear power station failures will suffer for generations
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Muse
5.0 out of 5 stars Dr Ian Fairlie says it as it is.Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 3, 2019
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Another reviewer, Dr Ian Fairlie, says it the way I would have liked to have said it.
I would have given it four stars only for the occasional poor punctuation (poor proofreading/editing), but the contents, as well as the quality of material for the hardcover and pages, are so good that it should get six stars!
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Peter W.
5.0 out of 5 stars The Nuclear TruthReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 6, 2020
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I now know the truth not only about Chernobyl but how All world governments lied and covered up the damage they did to the worlds population by nuclear means during my 75 years due to this book.
It should be read by all thinking adults.
The first nuclear reactor disaster was in the UK in the 50s at Windscale.
The powers that be covered it up.
A brilliant book.
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