My nonfiction pick for March. This was a collection of interviews from everyone that experienced the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl first hand. The author is Ukrainian born and she interviews former soldiers, government officials, mothers, fathers, elderly, nurses, children.
We learn that at first they didn't know what radiation was and they kept on with their routines and eating the food growing in their gardens. Playing in the road and kicking up dust. When the villages were beginning to be evacuated, they thought it was another war.
That was one of the confusing things while reading this. There wasn't a natural flow to how the interviews were placed. There were interviews about having kids and sex. The next would be how the government was blaming the west for causing a panic and that it wasn't that bad. The next would be all of the deaths due to the radiation poisoning. They also talked about the war, which one is not mentioned. It could have been WW2 because of the multiple mentions of Auschwitz and camps, or it could have been the cold war and the mentions of Leningrad, and Stalin.
I don't know what I was exactly expecting from this book. Maybe a more in depth look into what actually happened, but the eye witness accounts and how people didn't want to leave and how much vodka they drank because they really believed that the vodka would cure the radiation.
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