From Chernobyl with Love

2019 Foreword INDIES Award, Gold for Autobiography & Memoir
Bronze Medal winner within the Unbiased E-book Publishers Awards

Within the wake of the autumn of the Berlin Wall, the late twentieth century was a time of unprecedented hope for democracy and freedom in Jap Europe. The collapse of the Soviet Union left in its wake quite a few unbiased international locations the place the Scorpions’ 1990 pop ballad “Wind of Change” grew to become a rallying cry. Communist propaganda was lastly being displaced by Western beliefs of a free press.

Lower than twenty years in the past, younger writers, journalists, and adventurers corresponding to Katya Cengel flocked from the West eastward to cities like Prague and Budapest, searching for out terra nova. Regardless of the area’s enchantment, neither Kyiv within the Ukraine nor Riga in Latvia was the kind of place you’d look forward to finding a twenty-two-year-old Californian simply out of school. Kyiv was too near Moscow. Riga was too small to matter—and too chilly. However Cengel ended up dwelling and dealing in each. This e-book is her exceptional story.

Cengel first took a job on the Baltic Instances simply seven years after Latvia regained its independence. The thought of a free press within the Jap Bloc was nonetheless so promising that she in the end moved to the Ukraine. From there Cengel made a number of journeys to Chernobyl, web site of the world’s worst nuclear catastrophe. It was at Chernobyl that she met her fiancé, however as she fell in love, the Ukraine collapsed into what would change into the Orange Revolution, bringing it to the brink of political disintegration and civil conflict. Finally, this fall of idealism within the East underscores Cengel’s personal lack of innocence. From Chernobyl with Love is an indelible portrait of this historic epoch and a memoir of the best order.