Chernobyl's Wild Kingdom - Life in the Dead Zone

Reviewed by: Kathy George - Gray Public Library, Gray, Southern Maine Library District

Review Date: July 7, 2015

Review

All the plants, animals, trees, mosses, mushrooms- all are radioactive. It is a kingdom of radio active living things. In April of 1986, a planned test on the cooling system at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine went terribly wrong. To compound the disaster, the people who lived and worked for and around the area were not told of the explosion that released 400 times more radioactivity than the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima. It was the worst nuclear disaster the world had ever experienced. After the fire was put out(it took 10 days) and the residents were evacuated, a fence was put up and no one was allowed into the "Dead Zone." Scientists assumed that nothing would ever grow, reproduce, live in this space. But things did grow, and live, and reproduce and Rebecca Johnson explains why and how. The photographs support the text and give the reader a clear vision of what various groups of scientists have been studying these past 20 years. From the first explosion, the reader gets a taste of the mismanagement of the situation - people were not evacuated for 2 days, firemen sent in to put the fire out had no protective gear, and people started dying within weeks. Scientists from various countries have been studying the plant and animal life and have found that overall the populations have been thriving. But are they? What do the insides of the birds, voles, fish show that their outsides don't? This slim volume is gives various opinions of what has happened and why. The data these scientists have gathered and continue to gather is invaluable to the more recent disaster at Fukushima, Japan. It is a fascinating account of one of the greatest disasters in recent history. It is a CREAM book.

Overall Book Score: excellent