My Chernobyl

The devastating accident at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, then part of the Soviet Union, occurred on April 26, 1986. On April 29, Alexander A. Borovoi, an atomic physicist with the Kurchatov Institute in Moscow, was ordered to Chernobyl to help measure and control the release of lethal radioactive materials. He stayed for twenty-three years. In My Chernobyl, first published in 1996—at which time, the British magazine New World called it the best work of journalism for that year—Borovoi writes of his first two years at Chernobyl, when the initial response to the catastrophe was, as a rule, heroic, but unfortunately, not always effective.