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From the (Library e-)Bookshelf: Midnight in Chernobyl
There seem much cheerier things to be reading right now than a book about a nuclear power plant disaster, and to try for a “see, things could be worse” take seems all too much like tempting fate. Earlier this year, though, I’d got around to watching the five-part “Chernobyl” series shown on HBO and found it unsettling and compelling. Aware in general of “realities behind representations,” though, I did want to double-check some details and started looking up old National Geographic articles I remembered and taking chances on Wikipedia pages. Reading a book on the subject seemed that much better, however, and I did know there’d been one published not that long ago. On my last visit to the area bookstore before it closed for public health purposes, I found paperbacks of Adam Higginbotham’s Midnight in Chernobyl, but didn’t buy a copy. Afterwards, I was stuck with thoughts of buying an ebook version. Just to touch every base, though, I searched the catalogue of my local library’s ebook lending service, and found the book there. Signing it out did mean getting on a waiting list, and I did wonder if I’d have to wait until May to read the book even as I recalled the disaster had begun in April. However, checking the waiting list every day produced a few jumps forward, and I was able to sign out the book sooner than I’d expected.
I do remember a comment late in the series itself a show trial would produce villains and heros; the book’s narrative diffused both responsibilities from how the series had arranged things. I’d already known before seeing the series about the fatal trick of design to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s control rods that had driven the reaction out of control when an emergency shutdown had been started; the book, though, had suggested there’d been no last-second panic to start that shutdown, contradicting what I’d seen also intimated before the series. “Flying directly over the blown-open reactor” didn’t seem quite as lethal in the book as the series had kept implying, and there was a written comment about fears from some the plant operators and firefighters dying or at least suffering from severe radiation exposure were themselves radioactive, which had seemed the diciest implication of the series to me no matter how unsettling the makeup had got. (There was a comment in the book their hair had been shaved off early, both because of contamination caught in it and to head off the psychological effects of it falling out later.) Of course, regardless of the details the situation was threatening and the effects lingering.
I do remember a comment late in the series itself a show trial would produce villains and heros; the book’s narrative diffused both responsibilities from how the series had arranged things. I’d already known before seeing the series about the fatal trick of design to the Chernobyl nuclear power plant’s control rods that had driven the reaction out of control when an emergency shutdown had been started; the book, though, had suggested there’d been no last-second panic to start that shutdown, contradicting what I’d seen also intimated before the series. “Flying directly over the blown-open reactor” didn’t seem quite as lethal in the book as the series had kept implying, and there was a written comment about fears from some the plant operators and firefighters dying or at least suffering from severe radiation exposure were themselves radioactive, which had seemed the diciest implication of the series to me no matter how unsettling the makeup had got. (There was a comment in the book their hair had been shaved off early, both because of contamination caught in it and to head off the psychological effects of it falling out later.) Of course, regardless of the details the situation was threatening and the effects lingering.