Adam Higginbotham has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 3 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.5★ across 614 ratings. The most-rated is Midnight in Chernobyl.
Midnight in Chernobyl
Summary
One of AudioFile’s Best Audiobooks of 2019! The definitive, dramatic untold story of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster, based on original reporting and new archival research. April 25, 1986 in Chernobyl was a turning point in world history. The disaster not only changed the world’s perception of nuclear power and the science that spawned it, but also our understanding of the planet’s delicate ecology. With the images of the abandoned homes and playgrounds beyond the barbed wire of the 30-kilometer Exclusion Zone, the rusting graveyards of contaminated trucks and helicopters, the farmland lashed with black rain, the event fixed for all time the notion of radiation as an invisible killer. Chernobyl was also a key event in the destruction of the Soviet Union, and, with it, the United States’ victory in the Cold War. For Moscow, it was a political and financial catastrophe as much as an environmental and scientific one. With a total cost of 18 billion rubles - at the time equivalent to $18 billion - Chernobyl bankrupted an already teetering economy and revealed to its population a state built upon a pillar of lies. The full story of the events that started that night in the control room of reactor number four of the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Plant has never been told - until now. Through two decades of reporting, new archival information, and firsthand interviews with witnesses, journalist Adam Higginbotham tells the full dramatic story, including Alexander Akimov and Anatoli Dyatlov, who represented the best and worst of Soviet life; denizens of a vanished world of secret policemen, internal passports, food lines, and heroic self-sacrifice for the motherland. Midnight in Chernobyl, award-worthy nonfiction that reads like sci-fi, shows not only the final epic struggle of a dying empire, but also the story of individual heroism and desperate, ingenious technical improvisation joining forces against a new kind of enemy.
©2019 Adam Higginbotham (P)2019 Simon & Schuster
A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite
Summary
The bomb appeared early one morning in an upstairs office of Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino near Lake Tahoe, an enigmatic box covered in a bewildering array of switches. A neatly typed letter explained that the box contained 1,000 pounds of dynamite. It was the largest improvised explosive device in American history - and its creator promised to explain how to remove it safely if the casino delivered $3 million by helicopter to a remote landing site in the mountains. "Do not try to move, disarm, or enter the bomb," the letter warned. "It will explode." The bomb maker was one Janos "Big John" Birges, a Hungarian political refugee who had worked his way up from nothing to become a successful entrepreneur in Fresno, California - only to see his life unraveled in middle age by divorce, cancer, and gambling debts. By 1980, he owed hundreds of thousands of dollars to Harvey’s. And he had roped his two teenage sons - who were as eager to please their father as they were terrified of him - into a plot to get the money back. But the bomb he planted in the casino that August wasn’t just an extortion scheme. It was a brilliant feat of engineering - an intricate and deadly puzzle that Birges hoped would prove once and for all just how badly the world had underestimated him. In A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite, Adam Higginbotham draws from interviews with federal agents and Birges’ co-conspirators - as well as never-before-released FBI records - to tell the story of the race to stop one of history’s most bizarre extortion plots. By turns action-packed and darkly hilarious, A Thousand Pounds of Dynamite is an engrossing tale of genius at its most deranged.
©2014 Adam Higginbotham, The Atavist (P)2014 Adam Higginbotham, The Atavist