Dimensions
135 x 216 x 24mm
For most of us, travelling means visiting beautiful places - the bridges of 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, the place with the highest recorded emissions on the planet. But in Visit Sunny Chernobyl, Andrew Blackwell embraces a different kind of travel, going on 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 the Ganges in India, Visit Sunny Chernobyl couples first-hand descriptions 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. By turns 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, exposé and environmental memoir, with a bit of guidebook thrown in, Visit Sunny Chernobyl careens through a rogue's gallery of environmental disaster areas in search of the worst the world has to offer - and in the process, it approaches a deeper understanding of what's really happening to our planet.