Have just completed reading two books on the same subject – in this case the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine in the late 1980’s.  Book 1 – “Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Disaster” by Serhii Plokhy.  Book 2 – “Midnight in Chernobyl:  The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster” by Adam Higgenbotham.  Plokhy is from the region and a “survivor” of the events.  Higgenbotham is a American journalist and his book has received the highest praise and awards.

Reminder – my interest in the subject stems from my visit to the site in 1991, just a few years after the accident.

When I last looked at two books on the same subject, I commented that I thought it would be hard to find two books more different on the same subject.  Those books were Mohler and Dreher on the problems confronting the church in current America.  The differences lay in their radically different theological perspectives and their resultant view on exactly what is the church and its mission.

These two books on Chernobyl are as different, if not more so, than those two books were, but the differences are entirely stylistic.  Higgenbotham carries more technical detail, often regrettably with insufficient scientific context, and Plokhy emphasizes Soviet politics much more.  But these are superficial differences and do not account for the radical differences in the books.  I can also recall no factual difference between the books at all.  It really is about style.

Of the Higgenbotham book, it says in the Amazon blurb, “From journalist Adam Higginbotham, the New York Times bestselling ‘account that reads almost like the script for a movie’ (The Wall Street Journal).”  So much is that “movie script” quip apropos that I assumed the book was the basis for the HBO miniseries.  I have poked around a bit and cannot find any actual connection (though Higgenbotham was interviewed dozens of times in the wake of the miniseries concerning its “accuracy”) but the book is a page-turner on a par with anything written by the host’s favorite thriller authors.  By contrast Plokhy is a far more standard historical work, well written and very readable, but without the narrative drive that makes Higgenbotham hard to put down.

So which is the better book?

I doubt there are more than a handful of people that will agree with me, but the answer to the question is Plokhy.  Plokhy could be a much better book, don’t get me wrong.  But Higgenbotham gets in his own way.  He focuses so on creating a narrative and on vocabulary that borders on sensationalist to drive that narrative forward, that the reader finds him or herself  constantly wanting to check veracity.  Like watching a TV dramatization, one wonders what is factual and where dramatic license has been taken.  Let’s be clear, Higgenbotham takes no such license with known fact.

But Higgenbotham is also not the least bit afraid to speculate where facts are not known and to present suspicions and likelihoods with the same intensity as he does things that are known with certainty.  His narrative is so strong that only the most cautious, or in my case prior informed, reader will readily distinguish between the thorough evidence and anecdote – peer-reviewed fact and personal account.

There is so much about the effects of the accident that will never be truly known simply because scientifically it is an experiment without control – statistics without a baseline.  We just cannot know.

The goal of Plokhy is pretty clearly to condemn the Soviet state and its methods as the ultimate cause of the accident.  Higgenbotham surely wants to make clear it was a design flaw (born of typical Soviet governmental malpractice), not operator error, that is the proximate cause of the accident.  Here the two books more or less agree; Higgenbotham simply takes a more detailed technical approach.  But at that point Plokhy stops.

Higgenbotham; however, continues to discuss the relative safety of nuclear power production generally, comparing and contrasting on the most cursory of levels the accidents at Three Mile Island and Fukashima with Chernobyl.  He stops short of condemning it completely, but a general reader would most assuredly come away from the book thinking nuclear power generation inherently unsafe, even if it is non-carbon-emitting.  For example, Higgenbotham notes that both Three Mile Island and Fukashima were contained reactors (very different than Chernobyl) and as such the consequences of those accidents do not literally scatter in the wind, but he does so in such a passing fashion that the uninformed would carry away the impression that those accidents were almost as earth shattering as Chernobyl.

There is a very thin line between reporting and spin and Higgenbotham seems to jump back and forth across it many times.  This makes for a marvelous and compelling read, but I do not think it best serves the interests of history.

Chernobyl is one of those events on which history pivots.  It is certainly the catalyst, and perhaps the causal factor, for the ending of the Soviet Union – completely altering global politics and economics.  As such everyone should know what they can know about it, but equally they should know what they cannot know about it.

Higgenbotham has sold a lot more books than Plokhy.  That’s not surprising.  But if I had to guess which book they are still going to be reading in a couple of hundred years, my money is on Plokhy.