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everyeggmm 's review for:
Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
by Svetlana Alexiévich
Informative, beautiful, and downright haunting, "Voices from Chernobyl," by Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich is a collection of interviews, taken over the course of some ten years, concerning the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Speaking with a multiplicity of people ranging from liquidators to mothers to doctors, Alexievrich's interviews capture the personal traumas of a national emergency, as survivors try to find footing in a new world, one where nuclear power is no longer as innocent as it may have seemed previously.
It's hard to review a book such as this, where the writing is so moving and subject so somber that it feels more like I dreamed it than read it. That the book can produce such a feeling in the reader is owed mostly to Alexievich's masterful eye for detail, and ability to weave otherwise-disjointed interviews into a more cohesive narrative. The end result is a book that reads less like a collection of interviews than it does a memoir. It was in this structuring that the book's greatest strengths lie.
Though throughout, Voices of Chernobyl proved a glowing masterpiece, I at times couldn't help but wonder whether Alexievrich's flare for drama and narrative at times obscured the true reality of things from the reader. This wasn't the first I'd read about Chernobyl, and while indeed it was a tragedy, the scope of its devastation here seemed to be far overstated in parts. Nonetheless, one of the essential texts for anyone interested in the Chernobyl disaster--just make sure you read more rigorous texts and articles alongside it.
It's hard to review a book such as this, where the writing is so moving and subject so somber that it feels more like I dreamed it than read it. That the book can produce such a feeling in the reader is owed mostly to Alexievich's masterful eye for detail, and ability to weave otherwise-disjointed interviews into a more cohesive narrative. The end result is a book that reads less like a collection of interviews than it does a memoir. It was in this structuring that the book's greatest strengths lie.
Though throughout, Voices of Chernobyl proved a glowing masterpiece, I at times couldn't help but wonder whether Alexievrich's flare for drama and narrative at times obscured the true reality of things from the reader. This wasn't the first I'd read about Chernobyl, and while indeed it was a tragedy, the scope of its devastation here seemed to be far overstated in parts. Nonetheless, one of the essential texts for anyone interested in the Chernobyl disaster--just make sure you read more rigorous texts and articles alongside it.