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Alden Mudge

FictionFamily Saga

These Ghosts Are Family

Review by Alden Mudge

As the title of Maisy Card’s radiant debut suggests, this is a story of a family shaped and haunted by the past. The Paisley family’s origin story, revealed as the narrative circles down and swims up through eight generations of family life, begins with the particularly cruel form of slavery practiced on Jamaican sugar plantations. 

The novel opens in 2005, when 69-year-old Jamaican-born Stanford Solomon summons his female descendants to his home in Harlem to tell them who he—and they—really are. The women include Stanford’s home healthcare worker, who has no idea that he is the father she thought was long dead. 

Stanford, we learn, began life as Abel Paisley. In a miserable marriage and scarred by his experience as a rookie policeman, Abel leaves Jamaica in 1970 to find work in England along with his friend, the real Stanford. In London, they find work on the docks. When Stanford is crushed by a shipping container, the other dockworkers think the dead man is Abel. All black men look alike, right? Abel, now Stanford, seizes the moment. He abandons his family, still in Jamaica, and goes to New York to start a new life. 

But on this day in 2005, it’s time for a reckoning. This all happens within the first three pages of the novel. There are many other reckonings ahead.

Card is a beguiling storyteller, and These Ghosts Are Family is layered with fraught family relationships arising from the complicated legacies of the racial divide in Jamaica and in the United States. Card’s characters—even the ghosts—are vividly drawn and compelling. The story, told in a satisfying blend of dialect and standard English, will make the reader consider both the emotional lives of the characters and the worldly circumstances that shaped them and their choices.

Card was born in Jamaica and grew up in Queens, New York. She is a public librarian and now one of our brightest new writers. There is magic in these pages.

Maisy Card is a beguiling storyteller, and These Ghosts Are Family is layered with fraught family relationships arising from the complicated legacies of the racial divide in Jamaica and in the United States.
NonfictionHistoryBlack History

Overground Railroad

Review by Alden Mudge

Not even Candacy Taylor’s electrifying deep dive into the history of the Green Book can fully explain what inspired Victor Green to launch his guidebooks for black travelers in 1938. There were similar, short-lived guides meant to help black travelers avoid the humiliations of Jim Crow laws and so-called sundown communities, where black people had to be out of town by 6 p.m. But Green, who lived in Harlem and was a mail carrier in Hackensack, New Jersey, for 39 years, was informative, sincere and genial. He had staying power. His guides were published annually from 1938 to 1967, shortly after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, with a hiatus during World War II. In the best years, millions of copies may have been sold.

In Overground Railroad: The Green Book and the Roots of Black Travel in America, Taylor follows the chronology of the Green Book’s development and, more importantly, provides fascinating and often disturbing context. The first guide, for example, focused mostly on Harlem, so Taylor presents riveting stories about the Apollo Theater and the Lafayette Theater, where Orson Welles produced “Voodoo Macbeth,” a retelling of the Shakespeare play with an all-black cast. In the section that recommends a few golf courses open to black players, we learn that a black dentist named George Grant invented the golf tee, and that in Louisiana, a black man named Joseph Bartholomew designed public golf courses that he wasn’t allowed to play on. We also learn that the automobile freed black travelers from the constant indignities visited upon them when they took trains and buses; that Cadillac ordered its dealers not to sell to black people because it would damage the brand; and that, since black GIs returning from World War II had difficulty using the GI Bill for college, Green’s postwar editions included a list of black colleges and universities.

This only touches the surface of Taylor’s amazing book. As part of her research, she traveled thousands of miles and visited more than 4,000 sites listed in editions of the Green Book. Only 5% of those businesses still exist, most having succumbed to urban blight or urban renewal, which bulldozed many black neighborhoods to make way for local freeways. Taylor generated so much fascinating material in working on this book that she’s now developing a Smithsonian Institution traveling exhibition. 

Overground Railroad is an eye-opening, deeply moving social history of American segregation and black migration during the middle years of the 20th century.

Not even Candacy Taylor’s electrifying deep dive into the history of the Green Book can fully explain what inspired Victor Green to launch his guidebooks for black travelers in 1938. There were similar, short-lived guides meant to help black travelers avoid the humiliations of Jim Crow laws and so-called sundown communities, where black people had […]
FictionLiterary Fiction

Topics of Conversation

Review by Alden Mudge

In the opening chapter of Miranda’s Popkey’s bedazzling, psychologically fraught first novel, the unnamed narrator is a graduate student spending the summer in Italy, caring for the young twin brothers of a wealthy classmate who has already begun distancing herself. In her off hours, the narrator reads Sylvia Plath’s journal and describes herself as “daffy with sensation, drunk with it.”

Seeking advice on how to manage her rebellious young charges, the narrator knocks on the bedroom door of the boys’ mother, an elegant Argentinian psychoanalyst. The woman changes out of her bikini in front of the uncomfortable narrator and tells her that the boys are timid, eager to please and need to be punished. Later in this chapter, the psychoanalyst describes the dynamics of her first marriage to one of her college professors. The narrator never tells the psychoanalyst that she, too, has had a love affair with a professor.

Miranda Popkey’s first novel is a slender volume with the power of lightning.

Subsequent chapters span 20 years of the narrator’s life. Each has at its center a conversation with another woman or sometimes several women. Most of these women are social outsiders. In one chapter, the narrator meets a friend at a San Francisco museum where a Swedish artist is exhibiting work about female subjugation. The friend is distraught because of her breakup with her boyfriend. She admits she had an affair, but later she confesses that she invented the affair to get out of the relationship. The narrator observes that “beneath the first premise of our friendship was the understanding that we were, both of us, bad people.”

In a later chapter, the narrator crashes into the shopping cart of another woman at a Vons grocery store in Santa Barbara. They end up getting drunk together and going for a swim, and the other woman confesses that she abandoned her child. “I did the worst thing a woman can do, even though men—you know, you must know, men do this all the goddam time,” the woman tells her.

The narrator thinks she’s the smartest person in the room, and she probably is. She is keenly observant, but her sense of self wavers, and her self-knowledge tends toward the self-lacerating. Only at the end of the novel does the narrator see glimmers of redemption.

In the abstract, Topics of Conversation is about social and sexual power, anger, envy, pain, honesty, self-delusion and female identity. In the moment, the novel is riveting, disturbing and thought-provoking. It’s a slender volume with the power of lightning.

Miranda Popkey’s first novel is a slender volume with the power of lightning.
FictionHistorical Fiction

The Shadow King

Review by Alden Mudge

At the center of Maaza Mengiste’s stunning second novel is Hirut, an Ethiopian servant girl who rises to become an important warrior in the Ethiopian struggle to expel would-be Italian conquerors under the dictator Benito Mussolini, whose army invaded the country in the 1930s.

One of the thrills of the story is to witness Hirut, who is often harshly mistreated by some of her wealthier countrymen, develop into a determined and powerful person. But that is by no means the only wonder of the novel. Mengiste has said that at first she felt trapped by the need to stay true to historical facts. Luckily, she broke away from that suffocating exactitude and produced a work of fiction that is epic in reach, with brilliant borrowings from the forms of classic tragedy. There is, for example, a chorus that interjects and sometimes disputes the narrative being told. There are descriptions of photographs that render an intimate sense of the horrors and heroics of the war. And there are gripping descriptions of the battles themselves.

Then there are the other characters. The myth in Ethiopia about this war is that through courage and pluck the noble, outgunned Ethiopian peasantry defeated a modern, mechanized European army. It’s partly true. But in the range of her Ethiopian characters portrayed here is something closer to the truth: There are some bad actors on the side of the righteous. Likewise with Italians. The leader of the invaders is thoughtful and brutal; his war crimes are appalling. His photographer, there to document the victories and atrocities, is both soulful and morally compromised.

In The Shadow King, no character is completely pure. And the war is brutal. Mengiste often writes lyrically, but she also writes bone-chilling descriptions of the terror and savagery of the war. The book is impossible to put down or put out of mind.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read an interview with Maaza Mengiste on The Shadow King.

In The Shadow King, no character is completely pure. And the war is brutal.
NonfictionMemoir

The Ungrateful Refugee

Review by Alden Mudge

In 1988, when she was 8 years old, Dina Nayeri and her younger brother fled Iran with their mother, a doctor, who had received death threats from the government’s moral minders because of her activism as a Christian convert. They went first to Dubai, then were refugees in Italy before being granted asylum in the U.S. and arriving in Oklahoma.

In her well-received second novel, Refuge, Nayeri wrote a fictionalized account of her experiences. In The Ungrateful Refugee: What Immigrants Never Tell You, her first work of nonfiction, Nayeri offers a searing, nuanced and complex account of her life as a refugee and of the experiences of other more recent refugees from Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. The stories are terrifying, disheartening, sometimes uplifting and definitely worth reading and meditating on.

One of the most illuminating sections of the book is called “Camp.” In 2017, seeking to revisit her own experiences of exile, Nayeri volunteered in a refugee camp in Greece, where she served and talked to many refugees. It wasn’t all bleak. “People think of a refugee camp as a purgatory, a liminal space without shape or color. And it is that. But we kept our instinct for joy,” she writes. Still, it was a place of soul-destroying indignity and waiting. Refugees aren’t allowed to work. They’re not welcome at local schools. Young men entertain themselves by fighting.

Then there are the government bureaucracies that certify some refugees’ stories as “believable” enough for asylum and others not so much. Through her narrative, Nayeri makes vividly clear the Catch-22 of the process, especially for those asylum-seekers who are poorer, less educated and more desperate. 

Nayeri is not really an ungrateful refugee, as her title suggests. She writes about how as a youth she was driven to excel in order to escape her identity as a refugee. She went to Princeton, Harvard and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. But, as she points out, refugees are expected to be grateful in ways that deny their experience of loss, of leaving a place or a family they deeply love. In Oklahoma, for example, Nayeri realized that her education in Iran had been far better and more rigorous than her classes in the local school. Yet she was expected to say everything here was better. It wasn’t.

Nayeri is neither a journalist nor a polemicist. She’s a storyteller who invites our moral engagement. She doesn’t write directly about the situation at the U.S. southern border, but an engaged reader will certainly infer the stark human costs of our current official attitudes and policies.

In 1988, when she was 8 years old, Dina Nayeri and her younger brother fled Iran with their mother, a doctor, who had received death threats from the government’s moral minders because of her activism as a Christian convert. They went first to Dubai, then were refugees in Italy before being granted asylum in the […]
FictionFamily Drama

Family of Origin

Review by Alden Mudge

Some fictional worlds have a high threshold for entry, but once entered are sharply and mysteriously illuminating. That’s the truth about CJ Hauser’s second novel, Family of Origin.

In this novel, two estranged half siblings, children of a brilliant but erratic scientist named Ian Grey, meet at a privately owned Gulf Coast island—a former 1960s commune named Leap’s Island. They are there to retrieve Ian’s personal belongings and his secretive scientific research after he drowned swimming in the Gulf. Elsa, a mid-30s grade-school teacher who lives with her mother in Minnesota, and Nolan, her younger half sibling who works in online PR for the San Francisco Giants, enter a disorienting world where Baby Boomer-era scientists and a cultish science-fiction writer have come to investigate “Reversalism,” a theory about the undowny bufflehead, a duck that seems to be devolving, surrendering its evolutionary advantage. They hope to prove that evolution has started running backward.

Elsa and Nolan have a difficult, charged—even sexually charged—relationship that resolves into clearer focus as the narrative moves alternatively from the present into memories of the past and back again to the present. Her father divorced her mother when Elsa was 8, and she has always felt abandoned and resentful of her younger sibling because of how she was displaced. In a scene from their early history, she crawls behind 4-year-old Nolan into a brushy wilderness and then abandons him in a dry, shallow well he is too small to climb out of. As an unhappy adult, she plans to escape the misery of her current confusion and join a program to colonize Mars. Nolan, whose history we learn less about, arrives on the island with a kind of rational passivity, feeling dismissed and dominated by his older sister. Both feel alienated from each other and the adult world, less capable than their parents and trapped by their histories. In the week they spend on the island, they do come to at least a partial resolution—maybe even a sense of being freed from the past.

At times the storyline of Family of Origin creaks and groans and seems overly intricate. But sentence by sentence, Hauser is a sharp and often witty observer of human behavior. She brilliantly portrays some of the central issues of contemporary life, particularly issues for the lives of millennials. And she raises provocative questions about how contemporary human beings will survive and make full lives for themselves in the future.

In the end, Family of Origin is worth a serious read and some serious thought.

Some fictional worlds have a high threshold for entry, but once entered are sharply and mysteriously illuminating. That’s the truth about CJ Hauser’s second novel, Family of Origin.

NonfictionTrue Crime

The Queen

Review by Alden Mudge

During Ronald Reagan’s unsuccessful 1976 presidential campaign, he began telling a story about a woman from Chicago who used dozens of aliases to defraud government welfare agencies so that she could drive a Cadillac and live large. In his successful 1980 presidential campaign, Reagan again frequently referred to the so-called “welfare queen,” and he continued to do so in his policy discussions with Congress after his election. The implication was that there were thousands, maybe millions, like her ripping off the government and avoiding gainful employment. The system was broken, and he was going to fix it or end it.

Progressives and fact-checkers resisted these attacks on public assistance and railed against the stereotype Reagan was putting forward. Some thought the welfare queen was a figment of the president’s imagination. She wasn’t. Her name—one of her names—was Linda Taylor.

Josh Levin, the editorial director of Slate and host of the weekly sports podcast “Hang Up and Listen,” spent six years interviewing people who knew her and poring over the court and police records that trailed behind her. The story he tells is in some ways worse than Reagan could have imagined.

The Queen reveals a woman who assumed at least 30 identities to become one of the most astonishing con artists on record. She sometimes claimed to be white, or black, or Hawaiian, or Mexican. In her middle age, she convinced her most recent of six or eight husbands that she was decades younger than she actually was. She abandoned her children on many occasions. She didn’t just fraudulently apply for welfare; she conned insurance agencies, probably bought and sold young children to further her schemes, and may have murdered one of her husbands, as well as another woman who was under her spiritual care.

It’s a wild story. But that’s not the only story Levin tells here. With careful sleuthing, he tracks Taylor back to Tennessee in 1926 and to the birth of Martha Louise White, daughter of an unmarried white teenager and an unnamed black man when such unions were illegal in many states. Martha’s (that is, Taylor’s) mother would eventually claim her daughter was a foundling. At 6 she was kicked out of an all-white school. “No one wanted to lay claim to Martha Louise White,” Levin writes with sympathy. Themes of rejection, racial confusion and possible mental illness create a strong undercurrent beneath this fascinating story.

Much is murky about Linda Taylor’s life. But one thing is certain: She wasn’t a stereotype. She was one of a kind.

The Queen reveals a woman who assumed at least 30 identities to become one of the most astonishing con artists on record.

FictionLiterary FictionFamily Drama

Ask Again, Yes

Review by Alden Mudge

Mary Beth Keane’s well-wrought, emotionally affecting third novel, Ask Again, Yes, chronicles the lives of two neighboring working-class families over the course of four decades.

In the early 1970s, Francis Gleason, an immigrant from Ireland, and Brian Stanhope attend the New York City police academy together and are paired in field training. Francis quickly marries Anne, a nurse and Irish immigrant. Brian marries Lena, the daughter of Polish and Italian immigrants. Though their career trajectories are different, within a year or two, Francis and Brian end up as neighbors in a suburban town about 20 miles north of New York.

The families are not close. In fact, Anne is unstable and aggressively antisocial. But Brian and Anne’s only son, Peter, and Francis and Lena’s youngest daughter, Kate, develop an extraordinary bond. When Peter and Kate are in eighth grade, Anne commits an act of violence that rips both families apart.

All of this happens within the first quarter of Ask Again, Yes. The rest of the beautifully observed story is about the course of Peter’s and Kate’s lives—and through them, their families’—as they find and lose and find each other again. Not surprisingly, it is a fraught journey, shadowed by the dark bruises of their histories. Time, it seems, does not heal all wounds. But it does heal some. To say much more would betray a narrative that holds many surprises, large and small.

Keane sets her story among seemingly regular people in a normal-seeming American suburb. But Ask Again, Yes is a tale that will compel readers to think deeply about the ravages of unacknowledged mental illness, questions of family love and loyalty and the arduous journey toward healing and forgiveness.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Mary Beth Keane for Ask Again, Yes.

Mary Beth Keane’s well-wrought, emotionally affecting third novel, Ask Again, Yes, chronicles the lives of two neighboring working-class families over the course of four decades.

NonfictionAmerican History

The British Are Coming

Review by Alden Mudge

Six years ago, Rick Atkinson published The Guns at Last Light, the final volume of his brilliant, award-winning Liberation Trilogy, a narrative history of Americans in combat during World War II. This month, Atkinson returns with The British Are Coming, the first volume of the Revolution Trilogy, a history of the American Revolutionary War. This book is, in a word, fantastic. It offers all the qualities that we have come to expect from the author: deep and wide research, vivid detail, a blend of voices from common soldiers to commanders, blazing characterizations of the leading personalities within the conflict and a narrative that flows like a good novel.

The British Are Coming begins in 1775 with the lead-up to the battles of Lexington and Concord and ends in January 1777 after the battles of Trenton and Princeton. Many of us have heard of these places, and some of us have visited them. One of the many virtues of Atkinson’s skill as a researcher and writer is that he is able to strip away contemporary accretions and give readers a tactile sense of those times and lands.

Few of the Founding Fathers appear in these pages; they are off in Philadelphia writing their declarations and acts of the Continental Congress. But Ben Franklin, nearing 70, makes an arduous winter journey to Quebec as the Americans try and disastrously fail to split Canada away from Great Britain. Then there is Henry Knox, an overweight bookseller who turns out to be a brilliant artillery strategist. And the brothers Howe, leaders of the British Army and Navy, waver between punishing their enemies and treating them lightly to coax them back into the arms of the mother country. 

Towering above them all is George Washington, famous for his physical grace and horsemanship. During much of this time, he is such a failure that some officers plot against him, and he fears being dismissed as the military leader. Under his leadership, the army retreats again and again and again. The enemy mocks Washington, ironically calling him “the old fox.” He must beg soldiers to stay when their enlistments expire. He endures.

One of this book’s great achievements is that it gives readers the visceral sense of just how much the American forces endured. It’s moving to read accounts from soldiers who slept on the snow and frozen ground with their bare feet to a fire, then rose and marched without shoes or jackets to cross the icy Delaware River on Christmas night 1776 to rout British-paid mercenaries in Trenton. The British Are Coming is a superb ode to the grit and everyday heroism that eventually won the war.

The British Are Coming is a superb ode to the grit and everyday heroism that eventually won the war.

NonfictionHistory

Cities

Review by Alden Mudge

There’s much to wonder about in archaeologist Monica L. Smith’s thought-provoking, capacious, often witty new book, Cities: The First 6,000 Years. Why is it, for example, that in the very long history of the human species, cities—beginning with Tell Brak in Mesopotamia—are only 6,000 years old? What confluence of events helped urbanism arise at roughly the same time in many different places? And why are cities here to stay?

That is only the beginning of my questions. An archaeologist and professor of anthropology at UCLA, Smith has excavated ancient sites around the world and brings her wide and deep experience to her perspective on urbanism. Throughout her engaging book, she also affords the casual reader a glimpse of the tools and techniques of her trade.

Cities, Smith posits, were our first internet. They offered connectivity. They required dense, migratory populations where unfamiliarity became a measure of human relations. They also needed diverse economies and ritual buildings like churches. They were defined by verticality and a different scale of human experience than was available to rural populations. If that is obvious, less so are Smith’s ideas about consumption. In a chapter called “The Harmony of Consumption,” she asserts that “trash is an affirming badge of affluence” and digs among ancient trash heaps—surprising for their density of castoff human-made things—to prove it.

In other chapters, again drawing on her knowledge of ancient civilizations, she notes the vital importance of infrastructure. She observes that someone had to manage these projects: dams, pyramids, city grids, water supplies and trash removal. She describes these projects and project managers in surprisingly, almost shockingly contemporary terms. Can it be that ancient city-dwellers were not so different from 21st-century urbanites? Cities, it seems, have always required a level of middle managers and technocrats. Then, as now, there was a population of people from different backgrounds, vitally concerned with the nuts and bolts of life.

 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Monica L. Smith for Cities.

An archaeologist and professor of anthropology at UCLA, Monica L. Smith has excavated ancient sites around the world and brings her wide and deep experience to her perspective on urbanism. Throughout her engaging book, she also affords the casual reader a glimpse of the tools and techniques of her trade.

FictionHistorical Fiction

Outside Looking In

Review by Alden Mudge

Recent bestselling nonfiction books by Ayelet Waldman and Michael Pollan suggest that psychedelic drugs are poised to once again transform the zeitgeist. Could it be that we’re about to re-enter that buoyant experimental phase in which we look to psychedelics to unlock our spiritual and psychological prisons?

T.C. Boyle’s captivating 17th novel, Outside Looking In, takes the reader back to a similar moment in the early 1960s when LSD emerged from Timothy Leary’s and Richard Alpert’s experimental psychology labs at Harvard to quickly become the fuel for the transcontinental party bus of novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters—after which tripping became the coming-of-age ritual of a generation. The novel follows the well documented history of Tim, Dick and a coterie of grad students and followers as they travel—prodded along by frowning academic and legal authorities—from Harvard to Mexico to a 64-room mansion in Millbrook, north of New York City.

At its center is the fictional Loney family. Fitzhugh, “Fitz,” is a psychology grad student who has drawn Leary as his academic adviser; Fitz’s wife, Joanie, dropped out of college to support his career and have their child, Corey, now in his teens. They, especially Fitz, are outsiders at first. But they move into the group’s inner circle and experience the magic of its experiment along with its fraying edges.

Boyle, who apparently had his own days of wild and weird, is insightful and sometimes humorous in depicting the allure and chaos of attempting to live communally under the egocentric leadership of Timothy Leary, expand the individual and group mind through psychedelics, find God or not, and go deep into spiritual and physical love with people who are not necessarily legal partners. The novel vividly conveys what was seductively tactile, profound and sometimes scary about this moment in time.

But in the end, Outside Looking In offers a cautionary tale. A contemporary reader will wonder, for example, why in this communal paradise is it only women who cook and clean? And more importantly, after the party, what comes next?

Recent bestselling nonfiction books by Ayelet Waldman and Michael Pollan suggest that psychedelic drugs are poised to once again transform the zeitgeist. Could it be that we’re about to re-enter that buoyant experimental phase when we look to psychedelics to unlock our spiritual and psychological prisons?

NonfictionTrue CrimeSocial Science

Say Nothing

Review by Alden Mudge

Jean McConville was 38 years old in December 1972 when a masked man kidnapped her from her flat in a bleak housing project in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her 10 children, some of whom were clinging to her legs as she was dragged from her home, never saw her again. It was soon rumored that McConville, a Protestant once married to a Catholic, had been snatched—and probably executed—by the outlawed provisional wing of the Irish Republican Army because she was an informer.

So begins Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, The New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s gripping, revelatory and unsettling account of McConville’s murder and its reverberations throughout the 30-year spasm of violence known as the “troubles,” which left 3,500 dead in its wake. To tell the story, Keefe delves into a long and devastating history of open and hidden conflict, parts of which remain entombed within the IRA’s code of silence. With visceral detail, he describes life in the embattled neighborhoods, where suspicion and betrayal festered on all sides. Keefe also offers compelling portraits of some of the leading figures in the conflict, among them Gerry Adams, who helped broker the 1998 Good Friday Agreement that brought an end to armed conflict. He went on to preside over Sinn Féin, sometimes called the political arm of the IRA.

But the most riveting figure in this narrative is Dolours Price. She and her younger sister, Marian, were radicalized as students after a peaceful march for union with Ireland was violently attacked. Described as having a quick tongue, flaming red hair and a peacock personality, she was chosen by Adams for an elite squad. She played a part in McConville’s abduction, organized a car bombing attack on London and, when imprisoned, led a hunger strike that inflamed the romantic revolutionary imagination. But as a true believer, she, along with others, was devastated when Adams first denied that he was ever in the IRA and then brokered a peace agreement that did not include the unification of Ireland. She was, allegedly, not an inherently violent person, and she was left wondering what it was all for. Which is one of the most profound and unanswerable questions this searing book will leave in a reader’s mind.

The New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe’s gripping, revelatory and unsettling account of McConville’s murder and its reverberations throughout the 30-year spasm of violence known as the “troubles,” which left 3,500 dead in its wake.
NonfictionHistory

Midnight in Chernobyl

Review by Alden Mudge

One weird feature of the little-understood phenomenon of radiation poisoning is that after the initial acute nausea, there is a latency period when many people feel OK. The Soviet soldiers under Captain “Moose” Zborovsky, for example, were able to slosh around for an hour in potentially lethal, gamma-emitting water while they desperately repaired the ruptured drainage under the melting core of Chernobyl’s Reactor Four, and at the time merely felt “exhausted, with an odd taste of sour apples in their mouths.”

Were these men heroic, servile, foolhardy or ignorant? This is one of many questions that will swirl in the minds of readers of Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster, Adam Higginbotham’s spellbinding book about the April 1986 nuclear explosion at Chernobyl. Based on nearly 80 interviews with survivors and a deep dive into declassified Soviet documents, this account pulses with the human dramas that unfolded as people, including more than half a million conscripts, contended with the deadly explosion and its aftermath.

Midnight in Chernobyl also offers profound insights into the failing Soviet system as Mikhail Gorbachev tried to save it with “a new openness.” Despite the new policy, there was much the aging bureaucracy could not readily admit. In a competition with the West, the Soviets had supersized their reactors and, it turns out, deployed a flawed design. A push for speedy construction led to shortcuts and substandard materials. Yet, in what would be the last show-trial of the flagging regime, the explosion was blamed on operator error, and the plant director, knowing the script, went to prison without protest. The Soviets also failed to track the effects of radiation on the many people who worked in the contaminated zone, so to this date, the lethal legacy of the blast is not fully known. Growing public awareness of the cover-up contributed to distrust and the eventual collapse of the regime.

This is an excellent, enthralling account of the disaster and its fallout.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2019 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Adam Higginbotham’s spellbinding book about the April 1986 nuclear explosion at Chernobyl. Based on nearly 80 interviews with survivors and a deep dive into declassified Soviet documents, this account pulses with the human dramas that unfolded as people, including more than half a million conscripts, contended with the deadly explosion and its aftermath.

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