Join us for an evening with Kate Brown whose book ‘Manual for Survival’ has been shortlisted for the Pushkin House Book Prize 2020. Kate will be in conversation with Serhii Plokhy, chair of the 2020 Prize judges and twice winner of the Pushkin House Book Prize in 2015 and 2019.
After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, international aid organisations sought to help the victims but were stymied by post-Soviet political roadblocks. Efforts to gain access to the site of catastrophic radiation damage were denied, and the residents of Chernobyl were given no answers as their lives hung in the balance. Drawing on a decade of archival research and on-the-ground interviews in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, Kate Brown unveils the full breadth of the devastation and the whitewash that followed. Her findings make clear the irreversible impact of man-made radioactivity on every living thing; and hauntingly, they force us to confront the untold legacy of decades of weapons-testing and other catastrophic nuclear incidents.
Manual For Survival is published by W.W.Norton/Allen Lane.
REVIEWS
"A magisterial blend of historical research, investigative journalism, and poetic reportage…[A]n awe-inspiring journey." —Economist
“This engagingly written book reads like a cold war thriller and uncovers the devastating effects of one of the world’s worst nuclear disasters.” —Alison MacFarlane, director, Institute for International Science and Technology Policy, George Washington University
“Kate Brown presents a convincing challenge to the official narrative of the Chernobyl disaster. Deeply reported and elegantly written, Manual for Survival is chilling.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction
‘Kate Brown introduces new archival material to document the public-health crisis — creating a handbook for a 'postnuclear reality'…. Brown’s page-turner skillfully weaves an original narrative on the long-term medical effects of the Chernobyl disaster.” —Nature
“With bountiful, devastating detail, Brown describes how doctors, scientists, and journalists—mainly in Ukraine and Belarus—went to great lengths and took substantial risks to collect information…. One of the most alarming—though also eerily beautiful—aspects of Brown’s book is her description of the way radioactive material moves through organisms, ecosystems, and human society…. Manual for Survival asks a larger question about how humans will coexist with the ever-increasing quantities of toxins and pollutants that we introduce into our air, water, and soil. Brown’s careful mapping of the path isotopes take is highly relevant.” —Sophie Pinkham, New York Review of Books
Kate Brown is an award-winning historian of environmental and nuclear history at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her previous book, Plutopia, won seven academic prizes. She splits her time between Washington, D.C., and Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Serhii Plokhy is a Ukrainian-American historian and professor of Ukrainian history at Harvard University, where he also serves as the director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. He has won the Pushkin House Book Prize twice - in 2015 for The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union and in 2019 for Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy.
