Great book! I really loved the insight into this disaster. I would recommend the book to fellow lovers of historic events.

This book made a complex subject easy to understand. I especially liked the chapter about how nuclear power plants work. Very informative!

Everyone knows what Chernobyl is, but I don’t think many really understand the lasting impact. This is a fabulous look at the event.

I remember watching the news coverage of this as a kid, and while I thought it was scary, it seemed so far away and remote. But reading this book puts you in the shoes of not only the plant workers, but the Pripyat residents and the USSR residents in general, and really brings the horror and tragedy up close. Higginbotham did a good job explaining complex scientific concepts, as well as capturing the chaos and panic in and around the Chernobyl plant in the immediate aftermath of the accident. Riveting.

I love reading about Chernobyl and this of course was a must read. Since I have read so much about the events on April 25, 1986, and the days following, there was not much I was not aware of, that being said, this is still a fantastic read. It give accounts of the actual event and insight into the people involved. For anyone who was not read much or anything on the topic, I highly recommend this book. I gave this a 5 star review. It is a very interesting, not too technical, insightful account.

I’m not even sure how to review this book. It was upsetting, anger-inducing, informative, and utterly engrossing. I’ve always been fascinated by this tragic event and this book really provides such a definitive, well-informed, and well-researched account of not only the event itself, but everything that led up to what made the event possible in the first place. The economic and political climate at the time. The lies and lack of due diligence. Honestly it reads like a horror movie. It is absolutely insane to think that this actually happened. The author did such a phenomenal job of interviewing real survivors and providing a true account of what happened without providing personal judgement or bias. There are scientific explanations of the reactor itself, how it was built, and how it worked, so definitely be prepared. I know some people don’t like those kinds of details, but I am so glad this information as included. It really helped to understand how the major catastrophe was set up to happen.

I honestly can’t recommend this book enough to anyone that appreciates historical non-fiction, and who have an interest in this moment of time in history.

Note: This review is based on an ARC from Netgalley.

"Midnight in Chernobyl" is a nonfiction retelling of the nuclear disaster. It's written as both a work of journalism and a work of history, so the notes are plentiful and the details hard to dispute.

What's good: There are times when the writing is riveting. That may sound like damning with faint praise, but I read this after reading another Chernobyl book, about 50 papers on said book, and the HBO miniseries--so keeping my attention on the subject would be a challenge. In addition, it's clear that the author received a lot of information from first-person interviews, including an exceptional effort to get into Brukhanov's head.

What's iffier: The author doesn't swing for the stars, so to speak, in drawing conclusions, at least in comparison with Serhii Plokhy's book on the same topic; that one is more aggressive in making an argument. That said, "Midnight in Chernobyl" takes its task of drawing together all available sources very seriously, and that is to be commended.

Last but not least: I'm struggling a bit with how to evaluate this, because it felt like the book was unending--but that was a misimpression. In the Kindle ARC I was reading, the actual text ends at 55% through the book. (The rest consists of notes, index, bibliography, etc.) So as I read, I was shocked at how it seemed like I wasn't progressing in the book, although of course I was. I know now that I'd misjudged the speed of reading the book, but it's hard to undo that first impression, fair or not.

I think everyone should read this book. It's an easy read in as far as it is not bogged down, yet it gives a lot of detail. It's unreal that this even happened!


Thank you NetGalley!

A very important book, comes across as a film script of a historical record. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC.

As a recently turned three year old on April 26, 1986 Chernobyl was not a word I heard unless it was the name of a new toy or Sesame Street character. Now as an adult I have heard of Chernobyl but only in the sense of it being a nuclear disaster. I never thought about everything that went into containing the reactor and the fallout from the explosion.

This is a good book to get a vast understanding of what happened and why. Parts of the story read more like fiction and that must be a result of talking to people that were there. So many more people survived for decades after the explosion and subsequent exposure than you would have thought which helps to enrich this story more than just reading reports.

I suggest non-fiction fans give this one a try. It is about the worst nuclear disaster but also about Cold War Soviet politics (which helped compound the aftermath.

I received a complimentary ARC copy of this book from through NetGalley. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

4*. This book was very informative and well researched. From exposing the negligence of the USSR to explaining in-depth about radiation rays this book gives the reader the knowledge of understanding everything that happened and, as a result, the ‘fallout’ that occurred! Chernobyl was a colossal screwup and this book points out ALL the technological oversights, inexcusable budget cuts for safety, and the operator errors involved. It also goes into detail how unprepared the plant/USSR was and the cover ups that took place after the accident.

The biggest problem I had with this book was how incredibly difficult it is to keep up with each of the people talked about in the book and the role they played in the accident. Even with a small guide for the book’s subjects it is near impossible to remember each character. I’d highly suggest writing or highlighting parts of characters descriptions that you can refer back to.

Lastly, I think it imperative to point out that probably the only thing good to come out of the accident was the fall of the USSR, but more negatively, is the lasting stereotypes against SAFE nuclear energy production and therefore our lasting reliance on fossil fuels. In the book, Higginbotham makes a interesting point that coincidentally happened just before Chernobyl. He indirectly shows that if not for Chernobyl we could be relying on SAFE nuclear energy production today:

“Less than a month before the explosion of Reactor Number Four in 1986, a team of nuclear engineers at Argonne National Laboratory West in Idaho had quietly succeeded in demonstrating that the first of these, the integral fast reactor, was safe even under the circumstances that destroyed Three Mile Island-2 and would prove disastrous at Chernobyl and Fukushima. The liquid fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR), an even more advanced concept developed at Tennessee’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is fuelled by thorium. More plentiful and far harder to process into bomb-making material than uranium, thorium also burns more efficiently in the reactor and could produce less hazardous radioactive waste with half-lives of hundreds, not tens of thousands, of years. Running at atmospheric pressure, and without ever reaching a criticality, the LFTR doesn’t require a massive containment building to guard against loss-of-coolant accidents or explosions, and can be constructed on such a compact scale that every steel mill or small town could have its own microreactor tucked away underground.”

Book and Film Globe review: I kept laughing out loud while reading this marvelous, remarkably-detailed look at the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. That made it a little awkward when someone asked, “What are you reading?” and I had to say “a nonfiction book about the worst nuclear disaster in history (so far).” I wasn’t ha-ha laughing. It was a bleak, “Dr. Strangelove” sort of laugh. I couldn’t do anything else in face of the idiocy and incompetence and sheer, frightening, dear-god-did-they-really detail I found on every page of Adam Higginbotham’s book Midnight In Chernobyl.

The tragedy begins with the very design of the nuclear reactors built at Chernobyl and throughout the Soviet Union. People knew they were deeply flawed. But that totalitarian state didn’t like admitting error. Disastrous accidents happened throughout the USSR, but they deemed each one a state secret. The state didn’t even tell the nuclear scientists and engineers at other power plants about them. And they certainly didn’t learn from the accidents,improve designs, or share what they learned with others. They made roofs of asbestos when other material wasn’t available. They used subpar building material. And on and on and on.

Thanks to the fall of that empire, and a mountain of declassified documents, Higginbotham gives a blow-by-blow account of the tragedy. He recounts the shame and bravery of those involved (sometimes the shame and then bravery of the same person). Then he continues the story through the cover-up and the blowback from Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempt at perestroika. Most importantly, he details the ongoing environmental and personal disaster impacting the earth and the people involved.

Higginbotham captures the voices and personalities of so many vivid characters, from high-ranking Party officials to the first responder who was luckily drunk the night he responded to the fire at the plant. This gained him some all-important protection from radiation.

Most memorably, he profiles Maria Protsenko, a diminutive architect, formidable, talented and no-nonsense. She was born in China to Sino-Russian parents and probably had two strikes against her from the start in the USSR. Her grandfather disappeared during a Stalinist purge. Two siblings died unnecessarily because of a curfew that kept her family from taking them to a doctor. Her father descended into opium addiction. And still Protsenko became a model Communist.

She planned the city where workers at Chernobyl lived. During the sudden evacuation, she proved a model of efficiency. Then she worked with soldiers trying to deal with the crisis and ultimately wall off the devastated area. Towards the end of the book, the author interviews her. When he can’t discern the smell of a book she brought out of Cherbobyl, Protsenko puckishly blows dust from it into his face. When he’s understandably horrified, she laughs off his concern. Who couldn’t love her?

Whether you read it for the drama, for the careful and fascinating science around this tragedy, as a warning for the future or simply as a horror story to share with unsuspecting brunch companions, Midnight In Chernobyl is first-rate, funny and ultimately so very, very sad.

(Simon & Schuster, February 12, 2019)

By Michael Giltz

Midnight in Chernobyl is perhaps the best English-language account of the 1986 nuclear disaster available. Higginbotham writes directly and clearly about complex scientific topics for lay readers, making the murky manageable, and covers the story from various aspects, adding depth and humanity to the facts of the accident. I appreciated the explanations of processes, hierarchies, and the bureaucracy that condemned so many both inside and outside of the USSR to death. The Higginbotham detail provided in describing locations, the geography, and the lives of those involved is excellent. The coverage of nuclear medicine is fascinating and often neglected in stories about Chernobyl. My only objection is the use of the term "abortion epidemic," which comes near the end of the book and is highly problematic and politicizes the book in a way that is neither appropriate nor meaningful. I would otherwise give this five stars.

Midnight in Chernobyl is a well-researched book that details the events that occurred during the Chernobyl disaster. I have been reading a ton of nonfiction lately so I was very excited to dig into this one.
Higginbotham did a wonderful job explaining the details.
I would recommend this book to anyone with an interest in historical events.

Thank you #netgalley and #SimonandSchuster for the opportunity to read this.

Chernobyl has been a topic that has interested me for a good many years now, so I had high hopes when I read the synopsis of this story. And let me be clear from the beginning, it was fascinating. But it also dragged along in parts and for me became a bit hard to understand.

It is however obvious just how much time, research and effort that the author put into this novel, and bringing not only the "technical" aspect of things to light, but adding a more human touch was brilliant.

I do believe this story will hold the interest of anyone who is interested in the true story of what happened that day.

DISCLAIMER: I received a complimentary copy of this novel in exchange for my honest review. This has not affected my review in any way. All thoughts and opinions expressed in this review are 100% my own.

Senior Lieutenant Alexander Logachev loved radiation the way other men loved their wives.

So begins Adam Higginbotham's exhaustive account of the April 1986 Chernobyl disaster, recounting a blow-by-blow of the unfolding incident and the monumental effects of the aftermath, amidst the context of Soviet politics and the USSR's place on the world stage.

The tone varies; at times it's storyteller-rich, as quoted above or in lovely, evocative lines like: "At the slow beat of approaching rotor blades, black birds rose into the sky, scattering over the frozen meadows and the pearly knots of creeks and ponds lacing the Pripyat River basin." I was mesmerized by this writing in places, which makes the portrayal of this village, soon to become synonymous with nuclear disaster, or "nukemare" as the New York Post elegantly called it, so vivid. Chernobyl had amusingly even been featured in a glossy "Soviet Life" magazine in a detailed report about "the wonders of nuclear energy".

When the meltdown in reactor 4 happened, it wasn't only a shock and surprise, but it challenged the foundations that this new, safe energy industry was built on, not to mention the new policy of transparency that Mikhil Gorbachev had enacted for the Soviet Union beginning the previous year.

And from somewhere in the heart of the tangled mass of rebar and shattered concrete - from deep inside the ruins of Unit Four, where the reactor was supposed to be - Alexander Yuvchenko could see something more frightening still: a shimmering pillar of ethereal blue-white light, reaching straight up into the night sky, disappearing into infinity. Delicate and strange, and encircled by a flickering spectrum of colors conjured by flames from within the burning building and superheated chunks of metal and machinery, the beautiful phosphorescence transfixed Yuvchenko for a few seconds.

Losing face in the world's eyes was unacceptable, never mind what the magnitude of the disaster would mean for people in the unstable USSR who'd been assured nuclear energy was a safe and vastly promising industry for the future. Infamous Soviet censorship had already been at work downplaying the incident at Three Mile Island in the US, for fear of shattering this carefully cultivated illusion: "As bad as it made the United States look, news of Three Mile Island was censored inside the USSR, for fear it could tarnish the ostensibly spotless record of the peaceful atom."

Information was still scant, and conflicting: the armed forces said one thing, scientists another. Now they needed to decide what - or whether - to tell the Soviet people about the accident. For Gorbachev, this was a sudden and unexpected test of the new openness and transparent government he had promised the Party conference just a month earlier; since then, glasnost had been nothing more than a slogan...the traditional reflexes of secrecy and paranoia were deeply engrained.

But for those who actually understood what they were working with, illusion didn't exist. The hidden problem in the aftermath was the party machinations that allowed the management of the meltdown, and those who assisted in the clean-up, to veer so tragically off course. We get a lot of this stark, affecting perspective here, like when Senior Unit Engineer Boris Stolyarchuk was struck by one thought upon realizing the scale of what had happened: "I'm so young, and it's all over."

Even after those on the scene were coming to terms with the reality, particularly when using dosimeters, that the ground radiation was at critical levels, it was hard to comprehend: one surveyor had to impress on a Party chief that the shocking readings he was showing were in roentgen, not milliroentgen. Those at the top insisted on "a can-do shock-work action plan of fantasy and denial," which employees were encouraged to report cheerfully to Communist Party chiefs, despite the obvious manifesting itself all around the exclusion zone.

There were signs that not everything in the city was quite as it should be. The technician's next-door neighbor, an electrical assembly man, spurned the beach that morning in favor of the roof of his apartment building, where he lay down on a rubber mat to sunbathe. He stayed up there for a while and noticed that he began to tan right away. Almost immediately, his skin gave off a burning smell. At one point, he came down for a break, and his neighbor found him oddly excited and good humored, as if he'd been drinking.

As informative and readable as I found some parts of the book, others were difficult to process with very little scientific background of my own as basis. That's more on me, but worth mentioning for other readers who might similarly be lacking here. The author starts out explaining the science behind nuclear energy, beginning with the basics, incredibly well - I couldn't believe how clearly he wrote this introduction to the topic and how much I could understand of a subject that's always felt dense.

But it wasn't an understanding I could maintain as the details became increasingly complex, and I found myself avoiding the book because I struggled to make any progress through sections that were nuclear- or technology-focused, as well written as they may be. So I'd caution that prior knowledge here is necessary, and if you don't have that, then at least have the patience and focus to concentrate intensely on these parts, which are numerous and lengthy enough to disturb your reading experience if you're not processing them.

Nevertheless, it's a deeply comprehensive telling of this incident and its complex, frightening aftermath, not to mention the sociopolitical circumstances that allowed it to go wrong and wronger. If Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl illustrates the human effects, sometimes dreamy and emotionally told, of the disaster and the world it created, Midnight in Chernobyl charts the fact-packed narrative from start to finish, including some very personal perspectives, the political machinations, and the technology underlying it.

I was so excited to receive a copy of this book from the publisher. It is an incredibly well researched history of the Chernobyl disaster. I also love the cover art - this book will fly off the shelves.

Midnight in Chernobyl is a definitive and chilling account of the nuclear disaster that began on April 25-26, 1986 when the fourth nuclear reactor of the Chernobyl plant imploded, causing a nuclear disaster that the USSR tried to deny but had to reveal when the fallout spread into Europe.

If you remember Chernobyl, this book is definitely worth reading.

If the words Chernobyl or USSR seem like ancient history, Midnight in Chernobyl is definitely worth reading.

When Reactor #4 of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Complex imploded due to poor design, construction, and human error, the USSR, then in its last years, did its best to keep as much of what happened a secret not just from the rest of the world, but from within as well, meaning that thousands upon thousands of people within the area and provinces around Chernobyl (located within the Ukraine) were unwittingly exposed to enormous doses of radiation.

The extent of the nuclear disaster spawned by the reactor implosion was and is enormous. Over thirty years later, the town built to house the worker complex of Chernobyl, a then bustling town named Priypat, remains contaminated with nuclear fallout, and it will remain (safely) uninhabitable for almost another 30,000 years. So will a large portion of the land around it.

Not uninhabitable for 30 years. Or 300. Or 3000.

30,000. Years.

Because the USSR, as Higginbotham explains, worked tirelessly to keep its secrets secret--there had been nuclear accidents in the USSR before, though nothing on this scale--and was still, even in the dawn of glasnost (the period where the USSR attempted to be more open to its citizens and the world, which led to its destruction) not interested or even equipped to be forthcoming about just how bad things were, it took years for what really happened at Chernobyl to come to light. And even now the repercussions of exposing so much radiation to so large an area is virtually impossible to study because so many records pertaining to the reactor number 4 and its destruction were destroyed or simply not created because so few could understand or even believe just how bad things were. (And because there were simply no resources or even plans to deal with this kind of nuclear disaster.)

The USSR, which excelled at so many things in its race with the United States and the rest of the world to harness the energy created by nuclear power, simply cut corners to get what it wanted, creating reactor plans and then using them to create electricity without considering the problems created when the reaction in question--the yield created by harnessing the power of atomic energy--went wrong. As a result, the consideration of potential problems weren't buried--they ceased to exist.

In 2019, it's almost impossible to think of a large scale nuclear disaster not being broadcast to the world in some way or form. Midnight in Chernobyl does an excellent job of showing how tightly the USSR controlled information internally and the extraordinary lengths it went to postpone any external release of information even when it was obvious to the pre-internet world that something truly terrible had happened.

Midnight in Chernobyl isn't perfect--since there are very few survivors left (the parts of the book that deal with the radiation exposure caused deaths are straightforward and more terrifying than fiction could ever be), there are very few first hand accounts, and any records created by the then USSR are often hard to access, cryptic, incomplete, inaccurate, or simply gone--the account of what happened is layered with a lot of scientific detail.

And while the explanation of how nuclear power works and the dangers that lay in early attempts to yoke the extreme danger and instability of harnessing it to create electricity is fascinating, there's so much more about the construction of early reactors, the various units used to measure radiation exposure*, and scientific infighting in the USSR about it, that Midnight in Chernobyl does slow its pace at times.

While I would have liked less of the scientific detail (*the radiation units, for example, don't matter to the narrative much because everyone involved in the reactor meltdown and lengthy attempt to contain it got this much: wayyyyyy too much) I see why it's there--to drive home the point that Chernobyl was very, very bad gain but to also fill out sections like the containment attempts, which boil down to: it was mostly luck that none of the other reactors exploded, to this day no one is really sure exactly where the reactor core went, and just about everyone involved in the containment efforts died. (!!!)

Having just said all that, the section of the book devoted to the attempt to first "clean" and then the increasingly frenzied efforts to contain the damage caused by Reactor #4's enormous and deadly nuclear blast that also produced days and and weeks and months of continued radiation leaking from what was left of the open and exposed reactor core is so very well done. It's chilling--bone deep terror inducing chilling--to see how ineffective the early efforts were in the race to literally bury the reactor. Yep, that's how Chernobyl was "fixed"-- what was left of the reactor was buried under an enormous metal structure as containment. And hope that that solution will continue to work. Will it?

Theoretically--probably. Maybe.

Check back in when another 30 or 300 or 3000 years have passed.

That's the ultimate and terrifying message of Midnight in Chernobyl. Over 30 years ago an enormous nuclear incident occurred, and a cover up was attempted. Though the cover up failed, it failed after thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people (not to mention animals and the earth itself) were exposed to massive amounts of radiation without any knowledge of it.

The damage caused by the destruction of Reactor #4 was immediate and long lasting. Scientists are attempting to study the effects, but monitoring the human fallout is nearly impossible as the USSR relocated thousands of Priypat residents who had been exposed to radiation, and also failed to track those who were exposed to the release of radiation that was dispersed via the wind, rain, etc. Attempts to study the effects of the radioactive fallout on animals and plants in the area are hampered by lack of funds, falling off of interest, and the whole "the area is deadly if you're in it for too long" thing.

Midnight in Chernobyl is thoughtful and more than a little frightening. It's a disaster story that no one seems to think about anymore even though its impact will be felt for lifetimes to come. Highly recommended.

This book was a fascinating read. The author did a great job of telling the reader how the accident occurred, but also how Soviet culture led to the specific way that the disaster played out.

It Includes some scientific detail about the causes of the meltdown, but still remains quite accessible to a reader who is not a scientist.

I definitely recommend this one for anyone who is interested in the strange history of the Chernobyl disaster.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for providing an advanced reading copy of this book.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of this book. This book covers before the nuclear reactor was even built in Chernobyl to the aftermath and 25+ years later. This was extremely well researched and easy to follow. I found at times it could be a little too technical for my taste. However the encounters with the different people that were involved really kept me going. Overall job well done. This covers a lot of area.