If you watched the HBO series "Chernobyl", then indirectly you are already familiar with the book by Svetlana Alexievich "Chernobyl prayer". Since the creators of the series took the material for the script, including from this book.
"Chernobyl prayer" is written in an unusual documentary and artistic genre. This is a collection of monologues of people who suffered from the consequences of the Chernobyl accident. Author Svetlana Alexievich for writing the book and interviewed more than 500 people: the liquidators of consequences of the accident, squatters (people who did not want to evacuate from radiation-contaminated areas), relatives of emergency workers, local residents, scientists, journalists, doctors. In 2015, Svetlana Alexievich was awarded the Nobel prize for her work.
In the book there is a conversation in the first person. These are people who lived in the infected area, firefighters, accident liquidators and their wives, doctors, children, teachers, journalists, and soldiers. It is hard for them to remember the difficult time that left an indelible mark on their lives, made them disabled, affected their children and it is unknown how it will manifest itself in the future.
In the book, I was struck by the fact that such a huge country as the USSR, built nuclear power plants, and did not prepare personnel for work. People who didn't know anything about radiation worked at the station. Yes, and all the rest of the people blindly believed in the state that was cheating on him.
The author shows how the world changed after the Chernobyl tragedy: trees, houses, land, animals-everything became deadly for a person. And even dead people are dangerous, so they were buried separately, under special slabs.
It is striking that many people who imagined and understood everything that was happening (physicists, chemists) cast aside any doubts before the party's assurances that everything was under control and there was no reason to panic. Outraged by the behavior of the authorities, who knew what was happening and, fearing for their own skin, party workers quietly took out their families, took special drugs, and did not give them to the victims, although the drugs were in excess and could be used for the population of the infected territories from the moment of the accident. It does not fit into the mind that, despite the infection of the territories, there was a struggle for the harvest. Heads of collective farms sold infected milk and meat, sent people to clean infected vegetables.

The author shows that the biggest tragedy of the Chernobyl disaster is that its scale still does not have a fair assessment. The material damage was assessed, and the first victims of the disaster who died during the fire fighting and in the first months of liquidation of the consequences are known. But no one kept a record of people who died from the effects of radiation exposure, did not count how many parents left after the dead children. There are no statistics on people whose health was undermined to the ground, who became disabled, were unable to start a family or give birth to children. A terrible, boundless tragedy for our fraternal peoples-Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian.

This tragedy affected everyone. We didn't know a lot, and we still don't know. The echoes of the disaster sound to this day with deadly diseases and poor ecology.
It is impossible to describe the range of emotions that covers the reading of the work. You're angry. Angry. Cry. You're sick of the liquidators.
If you ask me if I should read such a book, I will answer YES. We need to know how it was. After all, the radiation has gone nowhere. There is the entire same 30 kilometer zone where entry is prohibited. People who live near it, people who still work at the nuclear power plant.
Enterprising people organize excursions there. And next to it is a sarcophagus that breathes invisible death…

This book is a difficult read, but it is worth reading this book in order to know and remember about that tragedy. We must not forget those people who sacrificed their lives to save all of us and our future.