Visit Sunny Chernobyl: Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places - Softcover

Andrew Blackwell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099549646 ISBN 13: 9780099549642

Publisher: Cornerstone, 2013

Synopsis

For most of us, traveling means visiting the most beautiful places on Earth-Paris, the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon. It's rare to book a plane ticket to visit the lifeless moonscape of Canada's oil sand strip mines, or to seek out the Chinese city of Linfen, legendary as the most polluted in the world. But in Visit Sunny Chernobyl, Andrew Blackwell embraces a different kind of travel, taking a jaunt through the most gruesomely polluted places on Earth. From the hidden bars and convenience stores of a radioactive wilderness to the sacred but reeking waters of India, Visit Sunny Chernobyl fuses immersive first-person reporting with satire and analysis, making the case that it's time to start appreciating our planet as it is-not as we wish it would be. Irreverent and reflective, the book is a love letter to our biosphere's most tainted, most degraded ecosystems, and a measured consideration of what they mean for us. Equal parts travelogue, expose, environmental memoir, and faux guidebook, Blackwell careens through a rogue's gallery of environmental disaster areas in search of the worst the world has to offer-and approaches a deeper understanding of what's really happening to our planet in the process.

About this title

About the Author:

ANDREW BLACKWELL has worked as film editor, story consultant and reporter on projects featured on NPR, PBS, the BBC, the New York Times online, and in the weekly news magazine Dan Rather Reports. He lives in New York City.

Review:

"This book is based on a simple but brilliant idea: to hang out in the most polluted and toxic places on the planet. Well it's a brilliant idea for a book at any rate, if not a holiday" * Mail on Sunday * "[Andrew Blackwell] has seen the worst we can do to ourselves, met the best of us trying to repair the damage, and discovered - mystifyingly at times - beauty in the planetary dark side" -- Iain Finlayson * The Times * "This is one of the best concepts for a non-fiction book I have come across in some time ... There is a great deal of acute observation, proper thinking and challenging material in each of the journeys" -- Stuart Kelly * Scotland on Sunday * "An essential read. A very funny - and very disturbing - look at some parts of our world that need to be acknowledged. Visit Sunny Chernobyl is my new favorite guidebook to some places I admit to have visited" -- Peter Greenburg, Travel Editor, CBS News "A certain amount of depression and anger does result from reading Andrew Blackwell's Visit Sunny Chernobyl, but Blackwell is such a good and amusing travel writer, such an engaging companion around the awfulness, that you'll also come away somewhat entertained" -- Doug Johnstone * The Big Issue *

About this edition

• Publisher: Cornerstone
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 0099549646
• ISBN 13: 9780099549642
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 320