CEERES of Voices: Kate Brown - "Manual for Survival" - Fredrik Albritton Jonsson
Join us for a conversation with Kate Brown as she discusses her book, Manual for Survival: An Environmental History of the Chernobyl Disaster. She will be joined in conversation by Fredrik Albritton Jonsson.
Presented in Partnership with The Center for East European and Russian/Eurasian Studies at UChicago
Virtual Event
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About the book: 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.
About the author: Kate Brown is a Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of Plutopia: Nuclear Families in Atomic Cities and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford 2013). Her latest book is a finalist for the 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award.
About the interlocutor: Fredrik Albritton Jonsson is Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago. He specializes in British history, with a focus on questions of environmental change, science, and political economy in the period 1700-1900.
Related Titles
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...