Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters

"I absolutely love this book, and I’m not alone. My students love it too, and book prize committees seem to have loved it because it has won a raft of prizes in quite different categories, which is in and of itself amazing. Like Bolster’s book, it’s beautifully written and you don’t want to put it down once you’ve started it. It has an unusual structure in two senses. Firstly, it has very many very short chapters, which is unusual for academic books. It is published by Oxford University Press and has all the apparatus of a scholarly book, but instead of having six or seven chunky chapters it has maybe 30 or 40 bitesize chapters. So it’s unconventional in that sense, but it worked very well. Secondly, it is what Brown calls a ‘tandem history’ in that it toggles back and forth between a community in the state of Washington which was central in the US nuclear weapons production program, and a community in the southern Urals, in Russia, which was central in the nuclear weapons program of the Soviet Union. It deals with parallels between these two communities and also the differences. That works very well. She says it is not comparative history, but tandem history, although I do think it does make illuminating comparisons with that structure. Also, I’ve got to say, doing serious research about top-secret stuff is not easy, and Kate Brown knows how to do it as well as anybody. I think her format is starting to be influential. I’ve seen one or two books lately that have done the same thing, and I know one of my PhD students is sufficiently smitten with Kate Brown’s model that she intends to do the same thing herself. So there is room for that kind of unconventional structure, and if it becomes more popular I think it will be because of Kate Brown’s work. But, more broadly, environmental history that is attuned to matters of literary presentation, by authors who are trying to make their work appealing and not simply trying to impress their professional colleagues, is also on the upswing. This is not merely Kate Brown, there are lots of authors who have been doing this for decades, but she is among those who are more successfully writing for a broad audience. She, by the way, has a background as a journalist and that shows up in this book, because a lot of it is oral history. She’s very good at getting people to talk about things, including things they’ve been told they shouldn’t talk about."