It is almost impossible to hear the name Chernobyl and think of anything other than the catastrophic nuclear disaster that took place there in 1986. Chernobyl is many things - including the birthplace of tennis megastar Maria Sharapova - but it has never managed to overcome the disaster that is synonymous with its name. Even thirty plus years later, it is still the worst nuclear disaster the world has ever seen.
Adam Higginbotham's book seeks to persuade the reader to set aside what we think we know about Chernobyl, and to find out what really happened instead. For example, it is not widely known that the world was not informed of the disaster by authorities in the Ukraine, but by the directors of a Swedish nuclear power station who raised the alarm two whole days after it had happened. This prompted Soviet officials to grudgingly admit that there had been an accident, but they were reluctant to elaborate, keeping the facts of the matter safely behind the heavy protection of the Iron Curtain. Higginbotham also demonstrates how the Soviet obsession with secrecy was what made the accident possible in the first place. They also managed to re-write the actual facts of the matter until history was blurred and Chernobyl's history was structured in a way that told us what we should think about it, rather than what actually occurred.
Journalist and feature writer Higginbotham contributed to magazines such as GQ and the New Yorker for over a decade before turning his hand to penning a full-length book; as a first book, it made a spectacular debut, receiving the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non Fiction, and also earning a spot on the New York Times' top ten books of the year list. A native of the United Kingdom, Higginbotham is one of the most requested authors featured on the Simon and Schuster Speaker's Circuit.
