Overview

Chernobyl: The Final Warning is a moving eyewitness portrait that takes readers from the inner sanctums of Soviet hospitals to the devastated reactor itself. It recreates the drama of international diplomacy - in the limelight and behind the scenes - in a dramatic struggle against death. In the wake of the Chernobyl disaster, Dr. Gale, an expert on bone marrow transplantation, was summoned to Moscow by Mikhail Gorbachev, then General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, to help by leading a team of international and local physicians in treating the victims. Despite volunteering to travel to the other side of the world to help aide victims and the team, Gale and the other members of the US-Israeli team had to work under the severe restrictions placed upon them. In Chernobyl: the Final Warning, the doctor discusses the tragedy, the diseases it would ultimately trigger, the environmental damage caused on a global scale and hope for a safer world. Dr. Robert Gale gives an eye-opening account of the intrigue and competition between the United States and Soviet Union. Written with Thomas Hauser, this book tells the full story of his historic journey and offers a penetrating analysis of the nature of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons, their development, and the role they will play in our future. Chernobyl: The Final Warning has been adapted into a much-admired movie starring Jon Voight and Jason Robards. Its message is cold, bleak and urgent, but also one of hope. NEW! Afterward written in 2020, 34 years after the Chernobyl disaster.

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9781989728185

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THE NEW YORK TIMES: As a subject for a book, the Chernobyl disaster is a daunting challenge comprised of many smaller dramas - the drama of the first night's fight, the drama of the medical struggle, the drama of scientists battling the reactor with their minds while miners and helicopter pilots battled it with their bodies, the drama of a continent befouled and its population enraged, confused, afraid. Few people are better situated to bring to life the drama than Robert Peter Gale. He was the right man at the right time. Now he comes to us with Chernobyl: Final Warning, co-written with Thomas Hauser. Part primer, part memoir, part position paper on nuclear power and nuclear war, it is an ambitious project. KIRKUS: Hauser's contribution is in simplifying the intricacies of nuclear power for the general reader, while Gale supplies the drama of the struggle to save lives. What emerges is a gripping memoir, a story of man's battle for survival, cutting through the murky depths of natural bureaucratic sluggishness. With its immediacy of reporting and strong cautionary message, this compelling account deserves a wide and attentive audience. SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE: By turns tragic, touching and amusing, Chernobyl: Final Warning tells all in a minute-by-minute account that teaches as it goes. UNITED PRESS: Chernobyl: Final Warning is a bleak and provoking book which glows with passion and conviction; compulsory reading for everyone. LONDON MAIL: Chernobyl: Final Warning is a document with the immediacy and compulsive quality of a diary or even a thriller, designed to brand still further into our consciousness the universality of the Chernobyl experience. I learned much about bone marrow transfusions, the history of the world's nuclear industry, and indeed some basic nuclear physics without ever feeling I was being lectured, and this is a major value of the book. But above all, the work is imbued with a strong sense of morality. IRVING STONE: Chernobyl: Final Warning is an inspired book, written with warmth and crystal clarity; profoundly moving; a historic masterpiece which can help lead to the safety of our world. ALABAMA JOURNAL OF MEDICAL SCIENCES: One does not have to be a nuclear physicist or physician to appreciate this book. Chernobyl represents an important lesson that Dr. Gale and Thomas Hauser have effectively portrayed in Chernobyl: Final Warning. It should be read, its information digested, and never forgotten. THE FLORIDA TIMES-UNION: Gale and Hauser have produced an enjoyable book packed with humor, wit, human interest, charm, and terror. Chernobyl: Final Warning may be one of the most important, most enlightening, most fascinating books I have ever read. RICHARD RHODES: Chernobyl's smoking ruins and empty streets model the most terrible of mankind's possible futures. Chernobyl: Final Warning is important testimony. NORMAN COUSINS: Chernobyl: Final Warning is a remarkable document in which human interest and the national interest converge. A valuable contribution to the cause of a more rational and safer collective existence. PENTHOUSE Chernobyl: Final Warning takes readers from the inner sanctums of Soviet hospitals to the devastated reactor at Chernobyl, and into the limelight of international diplomacy. It's a book that ranks in importance with Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and Johnathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth. Yet it is even more moving because its drama is portrayed on a personal scale.

Author Information

Robert Peter Gale, MD, is an American physician and medical researcher. He is known for research in leukemia and other bone marrow disorders. From 1986-1993, Gale was President of the Armand Hammer Center for Advanced Studies in Nuclear Energy and Health, a foundation supporting research on medical aspects of nuclear issues, and from 1985-1990 Gale was the Wald Scholar in Biomedical Communications at UCLA. It was during this time that Gale volunteered his expertise in bone marrow transplants to the USSR, for the victims of radiation poisoning incurred during the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. Since then he has volunteered his expertise at other disasters including Fukushima after the earthquake and tsunami of 2011. His many awards for his scientific achievements include the Presidential Award from the New York Academy of Sciences. He has also received several awards for his humanitarian activities around the world including his work with victims of Chernobyl. Dr. Gale retired from the UCLA faculty in 1993 but remained on Medical Staff until 2019. He's currently a Visiting Professor of Haematology at the Haematology Research Centre, Division of Experimental Medicine, Department of Medicine, Imperial College London and an Honorary Professor of Hematology at the Institute of Hematology at Peking Union Medical College. He is an editor of several medical journals and recently retired as Executive Director of Clinical Research and Development at Celgene Corp. less Thomas C. Hauser is an attorney and well-known author with over 50 published fiction and nonfiction books. His ability to explain and bring to life events of complexity and importance has secured his reputation as a responsible and reliable social critic. His first published book, The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice, was adapted as Costa-Gavras's highly regarded film Missing, starring Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek. In recent years he has written extensively about boxing - he was recently selected for boxing's highest honor, induction into the International Boxing Hall Fame. less

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