Everything Was Radiant
Review by Kristen Iversen
CHERNOBYL: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe
BY SERHII PLOKHY
Basic Books, 404 pp., $32
IN APRIL 1986, I was living and working in a small village in Germany when I heard that radiation from an unknown source had been detected in Sweden. Later that day, the Soviets acknowledged that a nuclear accident had occurred at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine. It was one of the worst industrial disasters in world history and today serves as a defining moment of the Cold War. In my German village, we were told not to drink milk or eat blueberries. An uneasy feeling took hold. We didn’t know what to believe.
Serhii Plokhy, a professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard, was an up-close observer of what happened at Chernobyl. At the time of the accident, he lived less than 500 kilometers from the damaged reactor,
