Midnight in Chernobyl

It took me a bit to get into it, but once the groundwork was laid for the nuclear reactors and Soviet mindset, this book was FASCINATING. And HORRIFYING. And I want to ask how did I not know anything about this, but really I'm frustrated and horrified that even the people living in the area around Chernobyl, who were experiencing increased levels of radiation, didn't even know anything about the disaster because of all the bureaucratic secret-keeping and misinformation and propaganda.

Quite a feat of reporting. I'm not the greatest with Russian names (so many people named Alexander and Leonid and Valery!) but Higginbotham did a good job of including titles and attempting to differentiate the individuals from each other as they popped up throughout the book.