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Sentences of the week:

1. "I don't know what I should talk about-about death or about love? Or are they the same? Which one should I talk about?" Voices From Chernobyl

Further Reading

So far I have read almost half of the book. More into the book you get other individuals experiences from the Chernobyl disaster. There are so many people that were effected by it. In the book it is said that they keep the people in the hospital for fourteen days. And only fourteen days, because that is the time it takes for a person to die from radiation poisoning. In the book there is a woman whose husband has been exposed to high amounts of radiation. The husband was tested and he got 1,600 roentgen. The lethal dosage is 400 roentgen. Roentgen is a unit of measuring the amount of radiation concentration. The doctors said that he was basically a "nuclear reactor". But the wife never left his side. She stayed by him no matter what happened. The husband was obviously dying from the radiation sickness and the signs were easily visible. His skin was peeling off, he was extremely swollen, and parts of his body were abnormal colors. The worst part is that his wife was pregnant. And she wouldn't leave his side. When the baby was born the tested her and the baby had twenty-eight roentgen. All of the radiation went in the child's liver. The child had congenital heart disease. So while the wife stood by her husband waiting for him to die, the baby was taking all of the radiation that should have been inside of the wife. To me this is absolutely horrible. How someone could forget about the health of an unborn child to be with someone that will die soon enough is beyond me. If that were me in his shoes I would have told her to leave so that the child that we made would survive and therefore, be the last piece of me to remember me by. I can understand why the woman wanted to be with her husband as much as she could before he died, but there was no consideration for the unborn child what-so-ever.

In another section it talks about how even the animals were full of radiation. These animals were not normal anymore either. They didn't act normal. They ran away from every person they saw, even if the person brought food for the animals. The animals were all bald also. The radiation even made them go insane. The animals were starving too. They even ate their own babies. They had babies just for the purpose of eating them right away. This is understandable to me but is still weird. It just doesn't seem logical why an animal would eat their own baby when they could just as easily eat another animals baby and the parents. I obviously am not an expert in animal behavior or in anything. All I can do is think logically about what is happening, but I can't help to think that this nuclear disaster could have been prevented.

Voices From Chernobyl

For my first book I chose "Voices From Chernobyl" by Svetlana Alexievich. In my honest first impression I believe that this book will be more about the feelings and interactions of the Chernobyl accident, than a historical representation from eye witnesses. I have only just begun to read this book and I love it already. The story starts off with the author awaking to a noise. Her husband is a fireman and all of the fire men's wives live at the fire station with their spouses. To me this seems a bit strange but it is a foreign culture. As I read I hope to gain a better understanding on what the effects on this radioactive disaster had on these victims.

Reading Plan

I hope to read many books from a diverse genre than I am used to.