Visiting Chernobyl, A Considered Guide For Travelers: What You'll See And What To Know

"One of the great stories of our time . . . a wonderful anecdotal history of a great drama."--San Francisco Chronicle Book ReviewAs Washington Post correspondent in Moscow, Warsaw, and Yugoslavia in the final decade of the Soviet empire, Michael Dobbs had a ringside seat to the extraordinary events that led to the unraveling of the Bolshevik Revolution. From Tito's funeral to the birth of Solidarity in the Gda ́nsk shipyard, from the tragedy of Tiananmen Square to Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank in the center of Moscow, Dobbs saw it all.The fall of communism was one of the great human dramas of our century, as great a drama as the original Bolshevik revolution. Dobbs met almost all of the principal actors, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, Václav Havel, and Andrei Sakharov. With a sweeping command of the subject and the passion and verve of an eyewitness, he paints an unforgettable portrait of the decade in which the familiar and seemingly petrified Cold War world--the world of Checkpoint Charlie and Dr. Strangelove--vanished forever."Down with Big Brother ranks very high among the plethora of books about the fall of the Soviet Union and the death throes of Communism. It is possibly the most vividly written of the lot."-- Adam B. Ulam, Washington Post Book World

"One of the great stories of our time . . . a wonderful anecdotal history of a great drama."
—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

As Washington Post correspondent in Moscow, Warsaw, and Yugoslavia in the final decade of the Soviet empire, Michael Dobbs had a ringside seat to the extraordinary events that led to the unraveling of the Bolshevik Revolution.  From Tito's funeral to the birth of Solidarity in the Gda ́nsk shipyard, from the tragedy of Tiananmen Square to Boris Yeltsin standing on a tank in the center of Moscow, Dobbs saw it all.

The fall of communism was one of the great human dramas of our century, as great a drama as the original Bolshevik revolution. Dobbs met almost all of the principal actors, including Mikhail Gorbachev, Lech Walesa, Václav Havel, and Andrei Sakharov. With a sweeping command of the subject and the passion and verve of an eyewitness, he paints an unforgettable portrait of the decade in which the familiar and seemingly petrified Cold War world—the world of Checkpoint Charlie and Dr. Strangelove—vanished forever.

"Down with Big Brother ranks very high among the plethora of books about the fall of the Soviet Union and the death throes of Communism. It is possibly the most vividly written of the lot."
— Adam B. Ulam, Washington Post Book World

In The Final Decade of the soviet empire, Michael Dobbs was an eyewitness to the extraordinary episodes that led to the unraveling of the Bolshevik Revolution. Covering the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe for the Washington Post, Dobbs saw it all: Tito's funeral, the jubilation at the Gdansk shipyard where Solidarity was born, the euphoria and despair of Tiananmen Square, Boris Yeltsin facing down a coup. Down with Big Brother is filled with dramatic scenes and remarkable characters - heroes and villains, idealists and cynics, the tragic and the comic. On Michael Dobbs's watch, playwrights and electricians were magically transformed into presidents, while Communist Party leaders became jailbirds or newly minted tycoons. Basing his book not only on his presence at seminal events but also on hundreds of interviews, Dobbs identifies the seeds of the destruction and shows how Mikhail Gorbachev, in particular, was the unwitting inspiration for the upheaval of the empire, while he thought he could save the Communist Party by reforming it. Michael Dobbs concludes by saying that though Big Brother may be dead, his dark legacy is still alive, as we can see in the turbulence in Russia, Romania, Bosnia, and the other countries that once made up the most brutal empire of the twentieth century When Chernobyls reactor 4 blew up in April 1986 the roof blew away, a million pounds of concrete. Fire filled the sky. The reactors graphite core, radioactive and deadly, burned like charcoal for ten days. Visiting Chernobyl, framed by the author's visit, revisits the accident itself, relives the evacuation of the area, and discusses both the physical environs and the political circumstances of the Soviet Union at the time. Written in the comfortable, easy-going style of Bill Murrays adventure travel book Common Sense and Whiskey, Visiting Chernobyl is a quick, handy and accessible introduction to the worst nuclear accident in history, useful for those planning a visit and armchair travelers alike.