Reviews

Noah Sneider of The Economist praises the book as "a magisterial blend of historical research, investigative journalism and poetic reportage, Kate Brown sets out to uncover Chernobyl's true medical and environmental effects."^[2]

Philip Ball in the New Statesman speaks about the depth about her research: "She has obtained documents and records that seemingly no one else had ever read, including some that were plainly meant to stay as buried as the contaminated Chernobyl waste. The result is an extraordinary and important – if controversial – book."^[3]

Vitali Vitaliev of The Institution of Engineering and Technology calls the book "a magnificent monograph that stands out among the multiple books on Chernobyl simply because it tells us the truth – the whole unadulterated truth – about one of the worst disasters in history." and comments on the effort to downplay the effects: "Let's face it: the minimisation and even trimming-up of history's worst nuclear catastrophe has become a popular sport with some Western intellectuals, among whom I can count some deluded colleagues and friends. They keep repeating like a mantra the ‘magic’ number 62, the official death toll immediately after the 1986 explosion. By doing so, not only do they ignore the plight of tens of thousands of victims of the disaster, many of them children, who have since died of different forms of radiation sickness and cancer, they overlook the treacherous nature of the nuclear contamination and residual radiation capable of manifesting themselves years and even centuries after the tragic event. As Brown, a distinguished American scholar, herself remarks in the final part of her book: “Ignorance about low-dose exposure is, I have argued, partly deliberate.” and goes on to note: "Why were – and are – they doing it? The publishers of ‘Manual for Survival’ rightly suggest in the jacket blurb that the motivation for “(Western) scientists and diplomats from international organisations ... to bury and discredit the evidence” is that they were “worried that this evidence would blow the lid on the effects of massive radiation, released from weapons testing during the Cold War.”^[4]

Serhii Plokhy considers Browns research impressive and due to her 25 years of research in Ukraine, "Brown knows her landscape exceptionally well."^[5]

Writing in the Journal of Radiological Protection, Jim T. Smith criticized many aspects of Brown's Manual for Survival. He describes Brown's book as "deeply flawed and clearly biased history of the health and environmental impacts of Chernobyl" He criticized Brown for cherry picking writing "One of the major failings of this book is that the vast body of knowledge in the international scientific literature is almost completely ignored - except where it coincides with Brown's thesis."^[6] Jim T. Smith discloses in the conflict of interest section of his review, that he has previously receives funds from the nuclear energy industry.

Dr. Geraldine Thomas, professor of pathology at Imperial College and founder of the Chernobyl Tissue Bank, also criticizes Browns work. She states one flaw in Brown's logic: “It is just not true that the scientists try to minimize the effects of radiation. It would actually be against their own best interests to do so. They are mostly academics and are required to produce large amounts of money and papers for their institutes. You would be expecting them to argue for larger effects of radiation as the more serious the health consequences the more the money flows.” ^[7]

Brown published a response to Smith's critique in the Journal of Radiological Protection [JRP]. In it, she notes that recent research is moving away from Smith's conclusions that nature in the Chernobyl Zone is thriving. A recent article in the JRP about the Kyshtym reserve in Siberia (the result of an explosion in an underground waste storage tank that released 20 million curies) ruled that 70 years later the affected forests have failed to recover to their pre-accident state; that the numbers of soil animals were 15%–77% of those observed in similar but uncontaminated sites.^[8] Smith fails to include in his review the work of researchers who show depressed populations in the Chernobyl Zone at all but the lowest doses,^[8] and similar findings from Fukushima that concur with Chernobyl data.^[8] Smith set up a non-profit to produce and sell “Atomic Vodka” from the Chernobyl Zone.^[9]

Jim Smith rebukes five of Brown's claims in his reply.^[10] For one he points out that she has dismissed evidence he presented to her and characterized him as a desk-bound physicist in her book, even though he has done regular field work in the Chernobyl exclusion zone over the decades. The other four points brown discusses goes in other claims Brown made in her response, with regards to evidence gathering and contacting other scientists.

Sophie Pinkham writes in The New York Review of Books: "Brown writes about anticipating outraged letters from nuclear scientists and plant workers, oncology clinic staff, and others whose jobs require exposure to radiation. She details her scrupulous efforts to check and double-check her data, consult with scientists from many fields, and account for factors that might skew results. I suspect that she may be accused of alarmism nonetheless." She comments that the book is about more than Chernobyl: "Brown's careful mapping of the path isotopes take is highly relevant to other industrial toxins, and to plastic waste. When we put a substance into our environment, we have to understand that it will likely remain with us for a very long time, and that it may behave in ways we never anticipated. Chernobyl should not be seen as an isolated accident or as a unique disaster, Brown argues, but as an “exclamation point” that draws our attention to the new world we are creating."^[11]

Nick Slater of Current Affairs criticized flaws in Brown's research methods writing: "Although Brown's aims are certainly admirable—the arguments she uses to support them are not."^[7]