Kate Brown has 2 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 2 narrators, with an average listener rating of 4.8★ across 3 ratings. The most-rated is Manual for Survival.
Manual for Survival
Summary
Dear Comrades! Since the accident at the Chernobyl power plant, there has been a detailed analysis of the radioactivity of the food and territory of your population point. The results show that living and working in your village will cause no harm to adults or children. So began a pamphlet issued by the Ukrainian Ministry of Health-which, despite its optimistic beginnings, went on to warn its readers against consuming local milk, berries, or mushrooms, or going into the surrounding forest. This was only one of many misleading bureaucratic manuals that, with apparent good intentions, seriously underestimated the far-reaching consequences of the Chernobyl nuclear catastrophe. After 1991, international organizations from the Red Cross to Greenpeace sought to help the victims, yet found themselves stymied by post-Soviet political circumstances they did not understand. International diplomats and scientists allied to the nuclear industry evaded or denied the fact of a wide-scale public health disaster caused by radiation exposure. Efforts to spin the story about Chernobyl were largely successful; the official death toll ranges between 31 and 54 people. In reality, radiation exposure from the disaster caused between 35,000 and 150,000 deaths in Ukraine alone.
©2019 Kate Brown (P)2019 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Plutopia
Summary
In Plutopia, Kate Brown draws on official records and dozens of interviews to tell the extraordinary stories of Richland, Washington, and Ozersk, Russia - the first two cities in the world to produce plutonium. To contain secrets, American and Soviet leaders created plutopias - communities of nuclear families living in highly subsidized, limited-access atomic cities. Fully employed and medically monitored, the residents of Richland and Ozersk enjoyed all the pleasures of consumer society while nearby, migrants, prisoners, and soldiers were banned from plutopia - they lived in temporary "staging grounds" and often performed the most dangerous work at the plant. Brown shows that the plants' segregation of permanent and temporary workers and of nuclear and non-nuclear zones created a bubble of immunity where dumps and accidents were glossed over and plant managers freely embezzled and polluted. In four decades the Hanford plant near Richland and the Maiak plant near Ozersk each issued at least 200 million curies of radioactive isotopes into the surrounding environment. An untold and profoundly important piece of Cold War history, Plutopia invites listeners to consider the nuclear footprint left by the arms race and the enormous price of paying for it.
©2013 Kate Brown (P)2017 Tantor