At 01:23:40 on April 26th 1986, Alexander Akimov pressed the emergency shutdown button at Chernobyl's fourth nuclear reactor. It was an act that forced the permanent evacuation of a city, killed thousands, and crippled the Soviet Union. The event spawned decades of conflicting, exaggerated, and inaccurate stories.
This book, the result of five years of research, presents an accessible but comprehensive account of what really happened—from the desperate fight to prevent a burning reactor core from irradiating eastern Europe, to the self-sacrifice of the heroic men who entered fields of radiation so strong that machines wouldn't work, to the surprising truth about the legendary "Chernobyl diver," all the way through to the USSR's final show-trial. The historical narrative is interwoven with a story of the author's own spontaneous journey to Ukraine's still-abandoned city of Pripyat and the wider Chernobyl Zone.
The Romanovs were the most successful dynasty of modern times, ruling a sixth of the world’s surface for three centuries. How did one family turn a war-ruined principality into the world’s greatest empire? And how did they lose it all? &...
Narrator: Simon Russell Beale Published: 05/03/2016
The magnum opus and latest work from Svetlana Alexievich, the 2015 winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature—a symphonic oral history about the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the emergence of a new Russia When the Swedish Academy awarded...
Journalist Adam Higginbotham’s definitive, years-in-the-making account of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster—and a powerful investigation into how propaganda, secrecy, and myth have obscured the true story of one of the twentieth...
Distinguished Professor Emeritus Abraham Ascher offers a skillful blend of engaging narrative and fresh analysis in this concise introduction to Russian history.
Newly updated on the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, it covers the grow...
Winner of the Pulitzer PrizeOne of the Best Books of the Year: The New York Times From the editor of The New Yorker: a riveting account of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which has become the standard book on the subject. Lenin’s Tomb c...
The definitive, single-volume history of the Russian Revolution, from an award-winning scholarIn The Russian Revolution, acclaimed historian Sean McMeekin traces the events which ended Romanov rule, ushered the Bolsheviks into power, and introduced...
“Michael Farquhar doesn’t write about history the way, say, Doris Kearns Goodwin does. He writes about history the way Doris Kearns Goodwin’s smart-ass, reprobate kid brother might. I, for one, prefer it.”—Gene Weingart...
After two and a half years as NPR's Moscow bureau chief, David Greene travels across the country-a 6,000 mile journey by rail, from Moscow to the Pacific port of Vladivostok-to speak with ordinary Russians about how their lives have changed in the p...
A New York Times Bestseller for 12 weeks! "Helen Rappaport paints a compelling portrait of the doomed grand duchesses." —People magazine"The public spoke of the sisters in a gentile, superficial manner, but Rappaport captures sections of lette...
{"id":"1983970","ean":"9781515982852","abr":"Unabridged","title":"Chernobyl 01:23:40: The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster","subtitle":"The Incredible True Story of the World's Worst Nuclear Disaster","author":"Andrew Leatherbarrow","rating_average":"3.67","narrator":"Michael Page","ubr_id":"1983970","abr_id":"0","ubr_price":"13.99","abr_price":"0.00","ubr_memprice":"8.39","abr_memprice":"0.00","ubr_narrator":"Michael Page","abr_narrator":"","ubr_length":"Unabridged: 6 hr 25 min","abr_length":"Abridged: "}