The Long Shadow of Chernobyl: A long-term project by Gerd Ludwig.
"…you just keep on trying 'til you run out of cake."
I wondered how those people could go back to their homes knowing the dangers. Then I thought about my life, and I understood. Home. Roots. Memories. A connection to the very ground.
This disaster, as well as the nuclear bomb tests we mentioned in Trivia, make me think that we, the human race, have done much to begin digging our own graves. How very sad. What an enormous waste.
Then I watch/read news about events in Egypt, Jordan, Tunisia, Yemen. It can go either way in those countries, I know, but there is some reason for hope of better to come.
"…you just keep on trying 'til you run out of cake."
Spike, grab yourself a copy of Voices from Chernobyl, by Svetlana Alexievich. It's a series of interviews with people affected by the disaster, including several who moved back to the Zone and lived there now. A brilliant, disturbing book by one of Russia's great nonfictionalists.
In keeping with the long shadow, Alexievich will pay with her life for writing Voices from Chernobyl; she acquired a rare immunodeficiency disease due to her travels throughout the Zone to meet and interview people.
Life is the misery we endure between disappointments.
That royally sucks. (Duh) Added to the list.
To sidestep a bit, I'll add Dear Comrade Editor, Reader's Letters to the Soviet Press Under Perestroika. It was from a US university imprint so probably impossible to buy but interlibrary loan'll work.
Quotidian concerns create a pointelist canvas of a people in change. It's the social estrangement side of Steer's coinage and a clue to the source of these desolate Eastern European games*. The painting is one of desperate yearning.
It is the most moving book I've ever read.
*There was also that reactor going kablooie, which may have been a small influence.
[edit] Don't read it. I opened it at random and hit two letters. One from a woman explaining how she met the love of her life and at great risk smuggled in a US lesbian magazine in the old Soviet days to see how she'd react (well) and one from a gay man from a gay man anonymously writing to decryAIDs something, conflicted feelings, I give up. Crying too hard to keep typing.
<goes and hides to bawl>
grooowrrrr! [menace menace] rrrrowwwr!
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