The second anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in April was marked by the publication of several books, each trying to tell the story from a different angle, each attempting to serve a different political purpose.
One of them, Richard Mould’s Chernobyl The Real Story (Pergamon Press), got the full endorsement and cooperation of Soviet authorities. The book contains 160 photographs, most of them provided by the Soviet news agencies, and therefore succeeds to some extent as a photo album depicting a truly great effort to rectify the consequences of a disaster. Unfortunately, the book contains no new facts or independent analyses.
Another recent book, The Chernobyl! Disaster by Victor Haynes and Marko Bojoun (Hogarth Press, London)— which the authors intended to be “an unanswerable indictment against nuclear power”—is a far more objective work.
However the most interesting new addition to the body of “Chernobylia” is Robert P. Gale’s moving story, ...
