Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy

Description: On the morning of 26 April 1986 Europe witnessed the worst nuclear disaster in history- the explosion of a reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Soviet Ukraine. The outburst put the world on the brink of nuclear annihilation. In the end, less than five percent of the reactor's fuel escaped, but that was enough to contaminate over half of Europe with radioactive fallout. In Chernobyl, Serhii Plokhy recreates these events in all of their drama, telling the stories of the firefighters, scientists, engineers, workers, soldiers, and policemen who found themselves caught in a nuclear Armageddon and succeeded in doing the seemingly impossible- extinguishing the nuclear inferno and putting the reactor to sleep. While it is clear that the immediate cause of the accident was a turbine test gone wrong, Plokhy shows how the deeper roots of Chernobyl lay in the nature of the Soviet political system and the flaws of its nuclear industry. A little more than five years later, the Soviet Union would fall apart, destroyed from within by its unsustainable communist ideology and the dysfunctional managerial and economic systems laid bare in the wake of the disaster. A poignant, fast paced account of the drama of heroes, perpetrators, and victims, Chernobyl is the definitive history of the world's worst nuclear disaster.

Notes: Serhii Plokhy is Professor of History at Harvard University and a leading authority on Eastern Europe, whose books include Lost Kingdom, The Gates of Europe, The Last Empire and Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy. At the time of the Chernobyl explosion he lived behind the Iron Curtain less than 500 kilometres downstream of the damaged reactor. Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy won the Baillie Gifford Prize for non-fiction in 2018.

Publisher: Penguin Books is a British publishing house. It was co-founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane, his brothers Richard and John, and V. K. Krishna Menon, as a line of the publishers The Bodley Head, only becoming a separate company the following year. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence, bringing high-quality paperback fiction and non-fiction to the mass market. Penguin's success demonstrated that large audiences existed for serious books. Penguin also had a significant impact on public debate in Britain, through its books on British culture, politics, the arts, and science.

Penguin Books is now an imprint of the worldwide Penguin Random House, an emerging conglomerate which was formed in 2013 by the merger with American publisher Random House. Formerly, Penguin Group was wholly owned by British Pearson PLC, the global media company which also owned the Financial Times, but in the new umbrella company it retains only a minority holding of 25% of the stock against Random House owner, German media company Bertelsmann, which controls the majority stake. It is one of the largest English-language publishers, formerly known as the "Big Six", now the "Big Five", along with Holtzbrinck/Macmillan, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster.