"Chernobyl, the Chinese city of Linfen and the Yamuna river in India aren't must-see destinations for most of us. So why would journalist and filmmaker Andrew Blackwell spend his vacations in polluted places like this? Visit Sunny Chernobyl is hard to categorize--part travelogue, part memoir, part environmental expose--but it is not hard to praise. It's wonderfully engaging, extremely readable and, yes, remarkably informative.
Blackwell purposely vacations in some of the world's most polluted places, informing readers of the relevant environmental issues as he reflects on his travels. In each of the disaster areas he visits, Blackwell immerses himself in the befouled environment (though he wisely chooses to avoid a bath in the sewage-filled Yamuna river), yet always manages, with a slightly irreverent wit, to find something worthy of his appreciation. As Blackwell notes while tracking giant floating masses of garbage at sea, "instead of finding degraded ecosystems that I could treat as though they were beautiful, I was just finding beauty. The world had gotten there first. I went looking for a radioactive wasteland and found a radioactive garden. I went looking for the Pacific Garbage Patch and found the Pacific Ocean."" (Shelf Awareness)
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