©Annette Hornischer
Books by Kate Brown
Kate Brown is Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at MIT. Her books have won numerous awards in the fields of environmental history, Slavic studies, and general history. She has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Carnegie Foundation, the European University Institute, The Kennan Institute, Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies, and the U.S. Holocaust Museum. Brown is also a consulting editor for the American Historical Review (AHR).
“I absolutely love this book, and I’m not alone. My students love it too, and book prize committees seem to have loved it because it has won a raft of prizes in quite different categories, which is in and of itself amazing. It is what Brown calls a ‘tandem history’ in that it toggles back and forth between a community in the state of Washington which was central in the US nuclear weapons production program, and a community in the southern Urals, in Russia, which was central in the nuclear weapons program of the Soviet Union. It deals with parallels between these two communities and also the differences. That works very well. She says it is not comparative history, but tandem history, although I do think it does make illuminating comparisons with that structure. Also, I’ve got to say, doing serious research about top-secret stuff is not easy, and Kate Brown knows how to do it as well as anybody.” Read more...
The best books on Environmental History
John R McNeill, Historian
“The best way to think about Kate Brown’s book in my mind is that it tells the story of Chernobyl that was not there at all in the miniseries. It’s interesting and intriguing. It’s a book about the people and the environment that were left after the HBO cameras stopped rolling” Read more...
The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize
Serhii Plokhy, Historian
Interviews with Kate Brown
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1
Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy
by Serhii Plokhy -
2
Producing Power: The Pre-Chernobyl History of the Soviet Nuclear Industry
by Sonja D Schmid -
3
Voices From Chernobyl
by Svetlana Alexievich -
4
Atomic Spaces: Living on the Manhattan Project
by Peter Bacon Hales -
5
The Politics of Invisibility: Public Knowledge about Radiation Health Effects after Chernobyl
by Olga Kuchinskaya
The best books on Chernobyl, recommended by Kate Brown
The best books on Chernobyl, recommended by Kate Brown
While widely regarded as the world’s worst nuclear accident, Chernobyl’s legacy remains fiercely contested, with death tolls ranging from 31 to 200,000. MIT historian Kate Brown, who has spent years in the Chernobyl archives, picks the best books on the disaster, compares its impact with atomic bomb testing, and argues for more research into low-dose radiation exposure
Interviews where books by Kate Brown were recommended
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1
The Return of the Russian Leviathan
by Sergei Medvedev & Stephen Dalziel (translator) -
2
Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait
by Bathsheba Demuth -
3
Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future
by Kate Brown -
4
Stalin's Scribe: Literature, Ambition, and Survival, the Life of Mikhail Sholokhov
by Brian Boeck -
5
This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible in Stalin's Russia
by Joan Neuberger -
6
An Impeccable Spy: Richard Sorge, Stalin’s Master Agent
by Owen Matthews
The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize, recommended by Serhii Plokhy
The Best Russia Books: the 2020 Pushkin House Prize, recommended by Serhii Plokhy
Every year since 2013 the Russian Book Prize run by Pushkin House, a UK charity, has carried out the important task of drawing attention to books that “encourage public understanding and intelligent debate about the Russian-speaking world.” Here, Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy, chair of this year’s judging panel, talks us through the books that made the 2020 shortlist.
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1
The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail
by W. Jeffrey Bolster -
2
Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters
by Kate Brown -
3
Ecological Imperialism
by Alfred Crosby -
4
The Unending Frontier: An Environmental History of the Early Modern World
by John F. Richards -
5
The Ecology of Oil: Environment, Labor, and the Mexican Revolution, 1900-1938
by Myrna I. Santiago
The best books on Environmental History, recommended by John R McNeill
The best books on Environmental History, recommended by John R McNeill
Environmental history is the study of the relationship between society and the natural world—both in terms of human impacts on the environment, and the constraints placed upon cultures by the landscapes they live in. Here, John R. McNeill, a pioneer of the field, recommends five of the best environmental history books with ambition, engaging prose, and heft.
