Publisher's Weekly Review
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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
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 a disaster 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.
Booklist Review
On December 3, 1984, there was a leak at the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India. Toxic gas, the by-product of a routine maintenance operation that was improperly carried out, spread over the city. Between 15,000 and 30,000 people would die especially gruesome deaths. Another 500,000 would be injured, their lives forever scarred. Nearly two decades later, the region surrounding the defunct plant is contaminated; the children of the area are prone to birth defects; and cancer and diseases brought on by faulty immune systems are rampant. This is the first in-depth chronicle of the event, told from the points of view of the men and women of Bhopal--plant workers, their relatives, their friends. Lapierre, whose books include The City of Joy (1985), teams up with Moro, a noted Spanish writer and journalist (and Lapierre's nephew), to produce a book that neatly balances the human story with the technical explanation of the disaster. Spink's translation from the French is smooth and natural. The authors' three-year investigation into the Bhopal disaster has produced a wealth of information. The maintenance error that caused the gas leak, for example, had previously occurred at another plant. One caveat: the authors spend a great deal of time on the period leading up to the disaster, which does not occur until nearly three-quarters of the way through the book. This is not necessarily a flaw, but it does mean that the period following the leak seems superficially covered by comparison. This minor quibble aside, the book--which has already received solid reviews in France, Spain, and Italy--is an excellent examination of an event that, almost 20 years later, is still making headlines. David Pitt.
