From Barnes & Noble
On December 3, 1984, a cloud of toxic methyl isocynate gas escaped from an a damaged tank in a Union Carbide plant and hovered over the ancient city of Bhopal, India. In the disaster that ensued, almost 4,000 people died, and thousands more were permanently disabled. It was the deadliest industrial accident in history. Dominique Lapierre, the author of The City of Joy, returns to India to re-create this terrifying event and its aftermath. His transfixing narrative weaves together the stories of hundreds of villagers and Union Carbide workers.
From the Publisher
"One of the premier historians of our time, Dominique Lapierre is the author of such stirring classics as Is Paris Burning? and The City of Joy. Famed for uncovering the humanity in historic events, he here joins forces with acclaimed writer Javier Moro. Together they investigate and chronicle each fateful moment counting down to what happened." "Union Carbide was a huge American corporation whose leaders had only the best intentions. In New York they invented a miracle insecticide. In ancient Bhopal, they formulated the lethal gas needed to produce it and built a giant plant to process it." But at five past midnight on December 3, 1984, toxic gas leaked out of a pesticide tank. By one-thirty geysers were spitting poison into the night wind. The apocalypse had begun. Banks of deadly fog filled nearby slums. Lungs burst. Corneas burned. Death would strike in seconds and no one was prepared: neither the bride at her wedding banquet nor the peasants who came to Bhopal for a better life, nor the shoemaker rousing his neighbors to flee their huts nor the Scottish nun risking all to rescue lost children. By night's end, over half a million Bhopalis were drowning in pain and chaos, and between 16,000 and 30,000 would die in the worst industrial disaster in history.
Philadelphia Inquirer
...a book no reader will forget...
Publishers Weekly
As with Lapierre's City of Hope, this latest project, co-written with Spanish travel writer and journalist Moro (The Jaipur Foot), is part historical documentation and part dramatization, a modern fable depicting the communities that weathered the effects of early globalization in India. After DDT was banned in 1973, American chemical giant Union Carbide began to push Sevin, a pesticide that calls for highly toxic and unstable ingredients in its production. They built a processing plant in Bhopal, India, where a combination of poor supervision and penny-pinching tactics eventually led to the world's worst industrial disaster: on December 3, 1984, the plant sprung a leak during routine maintenance procedures. The resulting noxious vapors killed between 16,000 and 30,000 and left 500,000 permanently injured. As Lapierre and Moro recount the disaster, they weave in the story of a family of peasants forced to leave their farmland and move to the Bhopal region, where their fate intersected tragically with that of the plant. The moral of the story is familiar (what's good for Union Carbide is not so good for the world), but it still packs a bitterly ironic punch. With their canned dialogue and patronizing tone, the close-ups of Indian life are not as effective as the authors' straightforward history of the accident. Nevertheless, the inherent drama of the story keeps the pages turning, and its lessons make the book well worth picking up. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.
Kirkus Reviews
An overly dramatized but nonetheless absorbing account of the most devastating industrial accident in world history. French journalist Lapierre (A Thousand Suns, 1999, etc.) and Spanish reporter Moro relate the terrible tale of Bhopal, the Indian metropolis devastated by a chemical leak at a Union Carbide plant; in just a few hours, as many as 30,000 residents of the city died of the airborne poison, and perhaps half a million others were sickened. In its early pages, the tale threatens to shape up as one of good against evil, pitting unwitting villagers against greedy capitalists ("Pulpul Singh exploited the economic misfortunes of the poor. . . . With a filthy turban on his head and his dagger ever at the ready, this villain was the terror of small borrowers"), but it eventually takes a more nuanced form. Union Carbide, the American industrial giant, had established a modern chemical plant in India-not to colonize the Third World (as some leftist critics charged at the time of the 1984 accident), but at the invitation of the government, which sought new weapons against "the planetary holocaust wrought by armies of ravaging insects," as a characteristically exuberant chapter title has it. The well-intended effort was misguided to the extent that India's farmers did not rush to adopt chemical pesticides, preferring to rely on time-proven methods of predator control. Facing lower than anticipated profits, Union Carbide workers and management took shortcuts in equipping the Bhopal plant with modern safety features and in observing proper procedures for storing deadly methyl isocyanate; Lapierre and Moro refer to a suppressed company memorandum acknowledging as much, one that warned that adisaster could strike at any minute. So it did, and Union Carbide earned much bad press-deservedly, it would seem-for seeking a low-cost settlement with survivors during "four long years of haggling . . . in the absence of a proper trial." Though long and sometimes clumsy, Lapierre and Moro's narrative will draw renewed attention to a terrible event.
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