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Title details for From Chernobyl with Love by Katya Cengel - Available

From Chernobyl with Love

Reporting from the Ruins of the Soviet Union

by Katya Cengel
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Eric Hoffer Grand Prize Award Finalist
2019 Foreword INDIES Award, Gold for Autobiography & Memoir
Bronze Medal winner in the Independent Book Publishers Awards
In the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the late twentieth century was a time of unprecedented hope for democracy and freedom in Eastern Europe. The collapse of the Soviet Union left in its wake a number of independent countries and Communist propaganda was being displaced by Western ideals of a free press. Young writers, journalists, and adventurers such as Katya Cengel flocked from the West eastward to cities like Prague and Budapest, seeking out terra nova. Despite the region's appeal, neither Kyiv in Ukraine nor Riga in Latvia was the type of place you would expect to find a twenty-two-year-old Californian just out of college. Kyiv was too close to Moscow. Riga was too small to matter—and too cold. But Cengel ended up living and working in both. This book is her remarkable story.
Cengel first took a job at the Baltic Times just seven years after Latvia regained its independence. The idea of a free press in the Eastern Bloc was still so promising that she ultimately moved to Ukraine. From there Cengel made several trips to Chernobyl, site of the world's worst nuclear disaster. It was at Chernobyl that she met her fiancé, but as she fell in love, Ukraine collapsed into what would become the Orange Revolution, bringing it to the brink of political disintegration and civil war. Ultimately, this fall of idealism in the East underscores Cengel's own loss of innocence. From Chernobyl with Love is an indelible portrait of this historical epoch and a memoir of the highest order.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    November 1, 2019

  • Formats

    • Kindle Book

    • OverDrive Read

      • ISBN: 9781640122390

    • EPUB ebook

      • ISBN: 9781640122390
      • File size: 3134 KB

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      October 1, 2019
      A then newly minted journalist recounts her sojourn in the one-time Soviet Union, a tumultuous empire desperately searching for its identity. "The year is 1998, and newspapers are still being read," writes California-based freelancer Cengel (Exiled: From the Killing Fields of Cambodia to California and Back, 2018, etc.). Looking for a job, the author answered an ad and found herself reporting from the ashes of the former Soviet Union. It was a confusing but compelling place, as her lively narrative reveals. Cengel begins in the once-occupied Baltic republic of Latvia. She made her way to the Ukraine just in time to witness a number of historical events and their aftermaths. Latvia was a particularly unknown spot on the map, or at least in the author's geography, and moving there was a rare and risky move that came at a time when "communication with far-off countries was less common than it is now." She quickly made herself at home at a Riga newspaper; soon after that, with her "lurid fascination" for fraught human-interest stories, she became features editor. Among the stories she recounts is that of a gulag survivor who was determined to see the international community recognize and condemn the evils of the totalitarian system that packed him off to Siberia in a railroad car. Another is of a Ukrainian woman who, a slave laborer in Germany during World War II, returned there as a tourist: "It had happened; apologies would now mean nothing." Throughout, Cengel demonstrates a knack for finding compelling stories, including an on-the-ground report from Chernobyl at a time when engineers were still working to cap off the reactor with a cement sarcophagus, "an imperfect and semi-temporary solution" that all these years later remains in place. More than her stories, the author has a fine eye for the details of newsroom politics back when newspapers were read and newsrooms were packed with offbeat characters. Sometimes gonzo, sometimes hard-charging--a welcome report from the front lines in a time of torment and hope.

      COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

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  • English

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