In some chapters, it was edited to make it extra scattered by interspersing paragraphs from different interviews. The interviewees would trail off or change the subject and talk really aimlessly. I recognize that to a degree that's inevitable when the book is made up of interviews. I think this is largely because of how scattered it was. Reading it didn't affect me quite as much as I thought it would. I didn't enjoy reading this book as much as I expected to. So much suffering could have been avoided if the government had been honest rather than clamping down on information and telling people not to worry. Some people mentioned feeling safer within the contaminated area than elsewhere based on violence they had experienced in other parts of Europe. The danger didn't seem real because it wasn't something you could see. People allowed themselves and their children to be exposed to radiation totally unnecessarily just because they didn't understand it. They never told people about the dangers of radiation. The misinformation propagated by the government was pretty astounding. It was pretty brutal reading about the animals suffering and dying. The saddest parts were the soldiers sent to slaughter the abandoned pets in theĪffected area. The people who chose to remain in the contaminated area typically spoke of their animal companions. Pets were sometimes evacuated with their families and sometimes had to be abandoned in the area around Chernobyl. Whether it was the author's influence, the culture,or something else, the vast majority of this book's stories mentioned pets. One thing aspect I was not prepared for was the animal suffering.
Other stories involved parents of children born with extreme birth defects, people who chose to live within the radiation area, or government workers involved in the damage control process in various ways. They watched their husbands die slowly of radiation, powerless to help. The ones that get to me are wives of the firemen and responders sent into the radiation to help the situation. Many of the interviews in this book are ridiculously sad. I heard excerpts of this book on the radio which required me to pull my car over and sob for a while as I listened to it. They are mostly stories from parents and spouses of people killed by radiation or people dying of radiation. Maybe monologues would be a better term since it's not questions and answers so much as stories ranging from a paragraph to several pages. As the subtitle implies, Voices from Chernobyl is a collection of interviews of survivors from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster.