Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Environmental Studies
Episode: NBN Classic: Kate Brown, "Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future" (Norton, 2019)
Description: This episode proved remarkably popular, so we're reposting it as an NBN classic for those who missed it the first time.We cannot learn from disasters we do not yet understand. That conviction motivated historian Kate Brown to conduct groundbreaking research into nuclear energy’s most infamous chapter and write Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future (Norton, 2019). By digging into recently opened regional archives, conducting dozens of interviews, and visiting sites across Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia, Brown sought to understand the extent of the damage from the 1986 explosion of Chernobyl’s reactor No. 4. From the...