From Chernobyl with Love

Reporting from the Ruins of the Soviet Union

This title was previously available on NetGalley and is now archived.
Buy on Amazon Buy on BN.com Buy on Bookshop.org
*This page contains affiliate links, so we may earn a small commission when you make a purchase through links on our site at no additional cost to you.
Send NetGalley books directly to your Kindle or Kindle app

1
To read on a Kindle or Kindle app, please add kindle@netgalley.com as an approved email address to receive files in your Amazon account. Click here for step-by-step instructions.
2
Also find your Kindle email address within your Amazon account, and enter it here.
Pub Date Nov 01 2019 | Archive Date Nov 29 2019

Talking about this book? Use #FromChernobylWithLove #NetGalley. More hashtag tips!


Description

Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Award Finalist
2019 Foreword INDIES Award, Gold for Autobiography & Memoir
Bronze Medal winner in the Independent Book Publishers Awards


In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the late twentieth century was a time of unprecedented hope for democracy and freedom in Eastern Europe. The collapse of the Soviet Union left in its wake a number of independent countries and Communist propaganda was being displaced by Western ideals of a free press. Young writers, journalists, and adventurers such as Katya Cengel flocked from the West eastward to cities like Prague and Budapest, seeking out terra nova. Despite the region’s appeal, neither Kyiv in Ukraine nor Riga in Latvia was the type of place you would expect to find a twenty-two-year-old Californian just out of college. Kyiv was too close to Moscow. Riga was too small to matter—and too cold. But Cengel ended up living and working in both. This book is her remarkable story.

Cengel first took a job at the Baltic Times just seven years after Latvia regained its independence. The idea of a free press in the Eastern Bloc was still so promising that she ultimately moved to Ukraine. From there Cengel made several trips to Chernobyl, site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. It was at Chernobyl that she met her fiancé, but as she fell in love, Ukraine collapsed into what would become the Orange Revolution, bringing it to the brink of political disintegration and civil war. Ultimately, this fall of idealism in the East underscores Cengel’s own loss of innocence. From Chernobyl with Love is an indelible portrait of this historical epoch and a memoir of the highest order.
Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Award Finalist
2019 Foreword INDIES Award, Gold for Autobiography & Memoir
Bronze Medal winner in the Independent Book Publishers Awards


In the wake of the fall of the Berlin...

Advance Praise

“Katya Cengel’s account of life in post-Soviet Eastern Europe is a joy to read: lively, informative, and hair-raising in equal measure.”—Vesna Goldsworthy, author of the international best seller Chernobyl Strawberries

“Katya Cengel writes with a rare honesty. Her narrative voice is both plucky and vulnerable, a combination that allows readers to feel her excitement, fear, and hope as a young American reporting from the former Soviet Union.”—Peter Nichols, best-selling author of The Rocks and A Voyage for Madmen

“Katya’s Cengel’s From Chernobyl with Love is a charming, bittersweet story of young love and journalism. She deftly captures the chaotic environment, first in Latvia, then in Ukraine, as the newly independent countries struggle to find their footing.”—Karol Nielsen, author of Walking A & P: A Vietnam War Memoir and Black Elephants: A Memoir


“Not too many young journalists would ditch the beaches of California for the cold, corruption, and chaos of Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. But Katya Cengel is no ordinary scribe. In her witty, insightful, and heartfelt memoir, From Chernobyl with Love, Cengel uncovers it all, from Latvian Nazis to Ukrainian uprisings to finding love in the land of nuclear disaster. From Chernobyl with Love is a rewarding blend of candid experiences and expert reporting from an important yet enigmatic part of the world.”—Franz Wisner, New York Times best-selling author of Honeymoon with My Brother

“Cengel is a brave and beguiling guide through stories and countries often ignored by the West, writing with passion about the people of Latvia and Ukraine and the trauma etched on their psyches by oppressive governments, corruption, starvation, and nuclear disaster.”—Jennifer Steil, author of The Woman Who Fell from the Sky: An American Woman’s Adventures in the Oldest City on Earth

“Katya Cengel’s account of life in post-Soviet Eastern Europe is a joy to read: lively, informative, and hair-raising in equal measure.”—Vesna Goldsworthy, author of the international best seller ...


Available Editions

EDITION Other Format
ISBN 9781640122048
PRICE $29.95 (USD)
PAGES 304

Average rating from 39 members


Featured Reviews

From Chernobyl with Love by Katya Cengel

Katya is an American journalist who lived in Latvia and later Ukraine starting in the 1990s. She is an intrepid traveler and adventurer who allows her readers to join her from their own comfy homes as she vividly shares tales of her work, dating and the difficulties of her life abroad.

This memoir will have you kissing ground where you live, grateful that you are not living in a former Soviet country.Doing without luxuries is a given since even basics like running water, heat and electricity are in often in doubt. Why she stays is beyond my understanding, though a romantic relationship plays a part.

This story is an easy read that will capture the interest of those who dream of living and working in a country very unlike their own. Katya’s travels for a good story, even to still-toxic Chernobyl, will leave you shaking your head in wonder.

My sincere thanks to #NetGalley and #UniversityofNebraskaPress/PotomacBooks for an ARC for this review.

Was this review helpful?

From the beaches of California to the former Soviet Union. Journalist Katya Cengel wants a job with a difference.
She was involved in the grime and petty crime that came from the dissolution of such a massive country. Why did she stay and suffer such illness, and harshness ? Why did she develop such a complicated relationship with a man.
Even collecting a parcel sent from her mother becomes a mass of red tape and attempted bribery and all it contained was over the counter medication and a retainer. Why did she stay so long, I have no idea. Is a well written account of history made and remade with a brush against Chernobyl. . I continued to read as I felt the chill of the unheated concrete apartments and the feel of unwashed linen, I am a soft southern soul and would have left within days of arriving. Kaya is made of sterner stuff.

Was this review helpful?

an amazing read.

I have always loved Chernobyl and seeing this journalist take on a challenge is particularly well done. I have always had a bit of an interest in Chernobyl and this book just makes me want to keep looking more into it.

I will be looking to buy this when it comes out as I think it is something I will keep reading.

thank you, NetGalley and everyone else concerned for letting me read this title early.

Was this review helpful?

I enjoyed reading about Katya's experience of living in post Soviet Eastern Europe and was in awe of how brave she was to go there in the first place. However I found it a bit of an odd read. It was like she was just writing down things when they came into her mind which I found very confusing! For example one minute she was describing visiting a journalist in hospital and then she was describing how she was now in hospital for her own health, with not even a linking sentence! I had to re-read it a couple of times before I understood what was going on! Just writing 'and the next time I was in a hospital it was for my own health' or something along those lines would've helped. This sort of thing happened a few times throughout the book, to the point where I nearly have up, but the experiences she personally lived through, and those of her residents and friends, were really interesting so plough on if you can!

Was this review helpful?

Katya Cengel found herself at a strange crossroads when leaving college. She needed to find experience to go work for a prominent newspaper, but she was looking for adventure. With the Berlin Wall coming down and cries for democracy in Eastern Europe at the time, the former U.S.S.R. was not exactly the place one would expect a young Californian to go willingly. The book From Chernobyl with Love covers Katya's years working in Latvia and the city of Kyiv. From going to the site of the poorly covered-up Chernobyl disaster site, living in an Eastern Bloc apartment, and the pretty terrifying world of medicine in the Ukraine, Katya learned a great deal of how to navigate a world where she barely spoke the language.

From Chernobyl With Love is not just a personal memoir, but also a look at what happens to people when they've undergone multiple regime changes, civil war, and starvation. Many people in Eastern Europe have experienced things folks in America are only learning about.  The book is fascinating and filled with moments where one wonders what they would have done in Katya's place. A great deal of her personal stories have to do with meeting her fiance and her friends that helped her navigate Latvia and the Ukraine.  

From Chernobyl With Love is available from the University of Nebraska Press November 1, 2019.

Was this review helpful?

As someone who currently lives in a foreign country I really enjoy reading about the experiences of others when they move outside of the United States. I found Katya's story to be really inspirational and brave. She set out, before even completing her college degree, to Latvia. That certainly isn't one of the glamorous locations that you think of when you consider journalists traveling the world. It was really interesting to learn about her experiences in the former Soviet Union. I really enjoyed Katya's storytelling abilities and enjoyed the experiences she shared!

Was this review helpful?

Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC in return for an honest and inbiased review.
To be honest this is not really my typical sort of read, but as someone of a certain age to have lived through the 80's & 90s and the break up of the old USSR this subject matter was of interest.
Loved the bravery of a young American woman, Kaya Cengel, heading off to the old Russian states to work as a reporter even though she couldn't speak the language.
Thoroughly enjoyed the story she told and remembered a number of the events, obviously not least of which being the events and aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster itself.
No hesitation in recommending.

Was this review helpful?

Katya Cengel's account of her time working as a journalist in the fragmenting chaos of post-Soviet Eastern Europe is an extremely valuable document of a time and situation that few in the west can fully comprehend. Her personal account avoids sweeping philosophical observations and analysis but within its detail of anxieties, misunderstandings and shared joy she gives a colourful insight of how lives fought to rassert and reset themselves under new regimes, or lack of them. The insidious fallout from Chernobyl plays an looming role in her story mirroring the lingering tentacles of surveillance and control of the failing state. As the illustrations suggest the youthful and enthusiastic Cengel seems to smile her way through every adversity and finds herself in a position to observe and report on the realities of the situation in a very personal way. It may not be reportage in the tradition of Orwell but her story is valuable in its singularity and focus.

Was this review helpful?

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 was a powerful symbol of the more widespread collapse of communist regimes in Europe and the thawing of relations between East and West. Since then, countries which were once behind the so-called “Iron Curtain”, including the Baltic states, have become popular tourist destinations – apart from enthusiastic competitors in the Eurovision song contest. However, it sometimes seems as if their years under Soviet rule or influence have not yet been shrugged off, giving them a strange and exotic aura. Decades after its demise, the USSR and its satellite states still exert a morbid or (depending on one’s sympathies) nostalgic fascination. Perhaps, this explains, in part, the enthusiasm for HBO’s tv series Chernobyl.

If Eastern Europe still feels ‘different’ now, imagine how it was like in 1998. For Californian journalist Katya Cengel, then just a twenty-two-year old college graduate, it was, both literally and metaphorically, at the other end of the world. Far from disheartening her, this challenge drove her to seek a job with the Baltic Times in Latvia and then, once this first leg of her European adventure was finished, to move to the Ukraine.

From Chernobyl with Love contains the memoirs of these difficult but rewarding years. Admittedly, the choice of title seems suspiciously like an attempt to capitalise on the current interest in Chernobyl – the book has little to do with that nuclear plant or its notorious disaster, apart from the fact that one of Cengel’s assignments in Chernobyl led to her meeting with her husband, whose step-father happened to be an engineer at the plant at the time of the explosion.

Yet, even if it’s Chernobyl which makes you pick up this book, you will likely hold on to it for other reasons. For Cengel is an engaging raconteur. The story she presents to us is, primarily, a personal one. She reveals much about her relationship with her family, about the friends she made in Latvia and the Ukraine, about falling in (and out of) love with the man who would become her husband. In her account, Cengel tends to downplay her professional prowess and successes – she’s actually a prize-winning, globe-trotting journalist. Her skill shows in the way she uses her (and others’) personal stories to comment on wider social, political and cultural issues. Thus, her own struggles with illness give her account a human dimension, but also serve as eye-openers about the dismal health services in the Ukraine. Her relationship (and subsequent rift) with her ex-husband, also serve to highlight the difficulty of bridging the almost irreconcilable differences between distant cultures. Small details reveal the hardships faced in post-Communist countries – from the constant struggle with the cold in less-then-comfortable residences to the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of Government offices (importing orthodontic retainers involved getting a personal authorisation from the Health Minister) and the quasi-farcical political posturing (as revealed in Cengel’s chapter about her assignment in the separatist state of Transdienstria). Several chapters recount the build-up to Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, as witnessed at first hand by the author.

From Chernobyl with Love is no history book. It’s something even more authentic – a personal account of some of the most tumultuous events in of the recent past.

Was this review helpful?

This was a very interesting and intriguing book to read. I enjoyed it. I would definitely read more from this author in the future.

Was this review helpful?

A fantastic (and beautifully written) picture of life through the iron curtain. Cengel spent the early part of her career in some extraordinary places at a pivotal moment in history. Always readable, the characters and events that she encounters while working in Riga and Kiev are fascinating. In the front line of the new free press Cengel shares her experiences of the massive cultural changes in eastern europe though the late 80s and 90's. A really rewarding read.

Was this review helpful?

Thank you to University of Nebraska Press and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an honest reivew.

As someone who spent a good bit of the 90s in Eastern Europe, I enjoyed this book quite a lot, because it brought back memories of those times for me. At the same time, the naive, carefree and clueless attitude put my back up a bit. Innumerable young US Americans flooded into the region after the iron curtain came down, but to her credit the author was open to the adventure, and tried earnestly to come to grips with the post-Soviet experience. The only thing that really bothered me was the author's descriptions of her friendships - but maybe I'm of a generation that values friendships and relationships differently.

There's not much historical and political analysis here, but intriguing insights into being a stranger in a strange land, which make for an entertaining read.

Was this review helpful?

A fascinating look at a country we know very little about other then what we read in the headlines.The author was very brave to enter this world she shares with us the lives of the people day to day suffering.This was a really interesting read the author shares her interactions her view of their lives.An author to follow through more of her life experiences.#netgalley#uofnebraskapress

Was this review helpful?

From Chernobyl With Love documents the writers time working in the Ukraine as a journalist. Leaving California for the Baltics was a culture shock to say the least. Adventures and experiences abound from budget sky diving where the instructions are in Russian and you don't speak a lot of Russian; almost being arrested by government officials for a parcel containing orthodontic retainers and ibruprofen; visiting a retirement home for dancing bears in Bulgaria; almost dying from pancreatitis - and finding love (although not everlasting) on a bus returning from Chernobyl.

A fascinating account of a time of upheaval, political protest and personal development.

Was this review helpful?

I received this book as a free ARC from NetGalley in return for an honest review. The book was a quick read. It gives information, through the author's experiences, on Russian and Ukraine culture, lifestyle, etc. and what makes those countries and their people. One of the cons was the book lacked a bit of cohesiveness. It jumped around leaving the reader to try and fit the pieces together, never finishing the story and leaving the reader hanging. At other times, it felt repetitive. I think this book would appeal to those who are interested in Russia, Ukraine, Chernobyl literature, culture, lifestyle, and history.

Was this review helpful?

Chernobyl has always fascinated me. As such, I was very excited to read this book. Fortunately, it lived up to the hype I'd built up in my mind.

Having read this story from the perspective of historians and Ukrainian citizens who lived in and near Pripyat, it was very interesting to see the disaster through the eyes of an American. I've read some complaints from people who believe that this story isn't for an American journalist to tell. That seems short-sighted, though, when you consider that Cengel lived in that area at the time and also married a Ukrainian man. Therefore, she has much more insight into this terrible moment in history than many may assume.

Whether this is your first book about Chernobyl or your 10th, it's well worth reading.

Was this review helpful?

From Chernobyl With Love is a very lighthearted recount of the authors time spent in Latvia & the Ukraine in the 90's. The author was in a position to give us a first hand account of what was happening in these two places at a very interesting time in their history. What we get instead is half stories, with no real detail. A chapter starts with an issue such as the missing teenage soldiers in Chechnya but after giving brief details, the author changes tack on to some hardship she encountered without completing the story on her reporting in to original issue. The most detailed & consistent chapters were when she was in hospital. Disappointing.
I was given a copy of this book by NetGalley and the publishers in return for an unbiased review.

Was this review helpful?

As often happens in life as well as in reading, there are books linked to coincidences. In this case there are two coincidences, one linked to my past professional life, which gives me a fair knowledge of the Chernobyl tragedy, the other to my current professional life and to the publishing house for which I work, which published "Il grande saccheggio" (The Great Plundering), a wonderful book by journalist Francesca Mereu, about the fall of the Soviet Union and its consequences on today's world.
Cengel's book is, so to speak, a sequel to Mereu's, since it talks about the events of Ukraine - one of the nations born from the fall of the Soviet Union - the fall of society, industry and the economy that followed the great plundering. It also speaks of Chernobyl, of course, albeit in a very limited way, since this tragedy is the epitome of the general decay.

Was this review helpful?

A quick read on a journalists perspective of living in a foreign land. Although interesting, it jumped around and wasn't very structured. But if you are interested in Chernobyl or culture and lifestyle of Russia, Ukraine, then you will most likely enjoy this read.

Was this review helpful?

FROM CHERNOBYL WITH LOVE: REPORTING FROM THE RUINS OF THE SOVIET UNION by Katya Cengel is a fascinating and entertaining memoir.

Katya may have a Russian first name, but she is decidedly not Russian. Instead, she is a white woman who was born and raised in California. However, that fact didn't stop her from applying to a reporter position in the Latvia.

With both the enthusiasm and naivety of a young adult, Katya had absolutely no idea what she was in for. She didn't speak the language. She knew almost nothing about the politics of the area.

You would assume that someone who had grown up in California with it's temperate climate and easy access to health care and all other amenities of our first-world country would get the heck out of Eastern Europe after experiencing her first winter. Not Katya Cengel. She is made of sterner stuff than 99% of the rest of the citizens of the United States.

Reading about her exploits and adventures will hold readers riveted. From skydiving with questionable parachutes to visiting the restricted area at Chernobyl (twice) it is impossible to put this book down.

From Chernobyl With Love: Reporting from the Ruins of the Soviet Union has won multiple awards and each one is well deserved. This book has everything that a great read should have - with the added benefit that it is all true.

Travel, adventure, crime, corruption, food instability, harsh living conditions, friendship, love, lust and a medically life-threatening situation. This book has it all ... and more.

Do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of this book asap.

I rate "From Chernobyl with Love" as 5 out of 5 ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️ ⭐️

Was this review helpful?

Readers who liked this book also liked: