Adam Higginbotham

Midnight in Chernobyl took more than ten years, built from archives opened after 1991 and from interviews with people who had been in the control room, in the helicopters and in the hospitals. What it manages that earlier accounts could not is to separate the Soviet official story from what the engineers actually did, including a design flaw in the reactor that the operators had never been told about. It runs hour by hour and reads like a thriller while inventing nothing. Higginbotham is a British journalist who reported for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine and The New Yorker, and his later book takes apart the Challenger launch decision.