Kathryn L. Brown Boeken

In Plutopia, Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia--the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Brown shows that the plants' segregation of permanent and temporary workers and of nuclear and non-nuclear zones created a bubble of immunity, where dumps and accidents were glossed over and plant managers freely embezzled and polluted. In four decades, the Hanford plant near Richland and the Maiak plant near Ozersk each issued at least 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment--equaling four Chernobyls--laying waste to hundreds of square miles and contaminating rivers, fields, forests, and food supplies. Because of the decades of secrecy, downwind and downriver neighbors of the plutonium plants had difficulty proving what they suspected, that the rash of illnesses, cancers, and birth defects in their communities were caused by the plants' radioactive emissions. Plutopia was successful because in its zoned-off isolation it appeared to deliver the promises of the American dream and Soviet communism; in reality, it concealed disasters that remain highly unstable and threatening today.--From publisher description.

After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, international aid organizations 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

While many transnational histories of the nuclear arms race have been written, Kate Brown provides the first definitive account of the great plutonium disasters of the United States and the Soviet Union. She draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington and Ozersk, Russia--the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias--communities of nuclear families living in highly-subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Plutopia was successful because in its zoned-off isolation it appeared to deliver the promises of the American dream and Soviet communism; in reality, it concealed disasters that remain highly unstable and threatening today.

Monumentálna kniha o černobyľskej jadrovej katastrofe. Príbeh explózie, ktorá zmenila svet a oči celej planéty upriamila na jedno dovtedy celkom bezvýznamné miesto. Hodiny tikajú. Sekundy ubiehajú. A svet pred katastrofou od toho po nej delí len tenká hranica. Teraz sa už všetko stalo. A my musíme zistiť, ako to prežiť. 26. apríl 1986 nezmenil len toto miesto, ale aj celý svet. Práca americkej historičky Kate Brown na tejto knihe trvala desať rokov. Skúmala archívne materiály, nahrávala hodiny a hodiny rozhovorov so svedkami katastrofy a ľuďmi žijúcimi v černobyľskej zakázanej zóne, aby napokon vytvorila nielen dôveryhodný obraz katastrofy a života po nej, ale aby sa pokúsila zmeniť aj oficiálny pohľad na tieto udalosti. Jej hrdinami sú vedci, záchranári i obyčajní ľudia. Černobyľ: Príručka prežitia, to je fascinujúci historický triler, ktorý ideálne dopĺňa obraz černobyľskej jadrovej katastrofy z obľúbenej knihy Černobyľská modlitba nobelistky Svetlany Alexijevič. Akú úlohu pri tejto katastrofe zohrali politici a odborníci v oblasti atómovej energie? Fenomenálna kniha Černobyľ.