Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb

“When things started going wrong in Kazakhstan earlier this year, I started dipping into a few books about it and found its history fascinating. The vast, wide-open steppe made it a place of herders for millennia, but during the Soviet era it was also a convenient location for deporting entire populations, locating gulags, and carrying out nuclear testing, which is what Atomic Steppe: How Kazakhstan Gave Up the Bomb focuses on. It’s by Togzhan Kassenova, a Fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in the United States, but also a Kazakh. She writes of her ‘immense gratitude for the privilege of telling the story of my land and its people.’ It’s scholarly and yet touching. Also, as many world powers seem to be heading closer to war rather than away from it, it’s perhaps hopeful that in the not-too-distant past a country that had more than 1,000 nuclear weapons when it became independent ended up nuclear-free.” Read more...

Notable Nonfiction of Early 2022

Sophie Roell, Journalist