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Chernobyl Prayer: Voices from Chernobyl (Penguin Modern Classics)

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What complicates the story is that Lyudmila is pregnant with their first child, and she knows that being with her husband will damage both herself and the baby.

Alexievich assembles the previously silenced or unsung heroes into a chorus that has the power to move, stun and inspire awe. Stories like this are, of course, hard to read, but Chernobyl Prayer is not just a compilation of horror.Flames lit up the sky and radiation escaped to contaminate the land and poison the people for years to come. There are insights, too, from atomic scientists who begged the authorities to evacuate people and from a former official who explains the institutional reasons for their inertia. One man actually reclaimed his front door – which his family had always laid the bodies of their dead relatives – snatching it in the night and taking it, like a thief, through the woods. What stands out from Chernobyl Prayer are the personal stories, the “missing history” of ordinary people and the wide variety of ways in which they see and experience and think about the same event.

Chernobyl is often remembered as a Russian incident, but 70% of the radioactivity fell upon Belarus, causing everything from the long-term poisoning of a quarter of the country’s farmland to an 64-fold increase in the rate of cancer.I thought I recognized the image in your header from the abandoned amusement park in Pripyat, so I was immediately interested in the story you were about to tell, but it’s even more interesting to learn that you took the pictures and toured the area yourself. Alexievich’s documentary approach makes the experiences vivid, sometimes almost unbearably so – but it’s a remarkably democratic way of constructing a book. It begins with the story of the young, pregnant wife of one of the first fire fighters, who responded to the fire at Reactor 4 of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant and of his slow, untimely death.

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