Manual for Survival, Kate Brown
Manual for Survival, Kate Brown
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Manual for Survival
A Chernobyl Guide to the Future

Author: Kate Brown

Narrator: Christina Delaine

Unabridged: 12 hr 53 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 06/11/2019


Synopsis

Dear Comrades! Since the accident at the Chernobyl power plant, there has been a detailed analysis of the radioactivity of the food and territory of your population point. The results show that living and working in your village will cause no harm to adults or children.

So began a pamphlet issued by the Ukrainian Ministry of Health—which, despite its optimistic beginnings, went on to warn its readers against consuming local milk, berries, or mushrooms, or going into the surrounding forest. This was only one of many misleading bureaucratic manuals that, with apparent good intentions, seriously underestimated the far-reaching consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe.

After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between thirty-one and fifty-four people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone.

About Kate Brown

Kate Brown is an award-winning historian of environmental and nuclear history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her book Plutopia won seven academic prizes. She splits her time between Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Massachusetts.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Will on June 08, 2019

Chernobyl was not a single event but was instead a point on a continuum; the radioactive contamination of Polesia lasted more than three decades. Chernobyl territory was already saturated with radioactive isotopes from atomic bomb tests before architects drew up plans for the nuclear power plant.......more

Goodreads review by Angy on January 06, 2020

Al libro le voy a poner 3,5 puntos. Para empezar quiero contaros que cuando lo solicite pensaba que iba a ser otro tipo de libros, aunque luego pensándolo mejor y recapacitandolo con algunas amistades me he dado cuenta de que este libro es "un ensayo" o eso creo yo porque bueno ya sabéis que yo no su......more

Goodreads review by Kasia on February 27, 2025

Kawał naprawdę dobrej, reporterskiej roboty, ale szczerze mówią w pewnym momencie czułam się znużona, bo już nic nowego ie wprowadzał, tylko trochę się zapętlił, Plus za to, że zainteresował mnie tematem, który zawsze omijałam szerokim łukiem (nie ciągnęło mnie nigdy).......more

Goodreads review by Laura on March 26, 2019

This is an exhaustively researched work, which attempts to get to the truth of the health effects of the Chernobyl disaster of 1986. Brown’s writing is engaging despite the sometimes dry subject matter. This book is as much an indictment of the international scientific community as it is of the Russ......more

Goodreads review by Seth on July 24, 2019

Access: Chatswood Public Library The clear triumph of Kate Brown’s Manual for Survival is her exhaustive parsing of classified archives, in order to distil the nuances of a deeply misrepresented industrial disaster. The approach taken to the subject matter is a no-holds-barred exegesis of political m......more