Kate Brown

In the heart of bustling European and American cities lies an overlooked yet vibrant corner of resilience, ingenuity and magic: our gardens. From pre-industrial England to modern-day Ohio, via the Paris Commune, Barackia in pre-war Berlin, Soviet allotments in Estonia, the orchards tended by Black migrants in Washington and food forests in contemporary Amsterdam, ordinary people, working with each other and with nature, cultivated life in the unlikeliest of places. Over the past three hundred years, these tiny gardens, often born from necessity and shaped by precarity, immigration and environmental crisis, have thrived by recycling nutrients, remedying contaminated soil and transforming how we think about our relationship to the earth. Tiny Gardens Everywhere is a hymn to the most fertile agriculture in recorded human history, showing that it occurred not on farms - the product of gigantic exertions of fossil fuels and technology - but with little effort in small garden beds. And the resourcefulness, intuition and inherited methods of their growers accomplished many of today's sustainability goals by producing local, diverse and organic food. Acclaimed historian Kate Brown unearths the long and battered story of gardeners and their gardens, asking what happens when these urban Edens are not seen as retreats from the city but become part of its social fabric, alive with histories of displacement, conflict and resistance. This is a book about land, but also about community, repair and the quiet revolutions that begin when someone plants a seed in unloved ground.

After the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986, international aid organizations sought to help the victims but were stymied by post-Soviet political roadblocks. Efforts to gain access to the site of catastrophic radiation damage were denied, and the residents of Chernobyl were given no answers as their lives hung in the balance. Drawing on a decade of archival research and on-the-ground interviews in Ukraine, Russia, and Belarus, Kate Brown unveils the full breadth of the devastation and the whitewash that followed. Her findings make clear the irreversible impact of man-made radioactivity on every living thing; and hauntingly, they force us to confront the untold legacy of decades of weapons-testing and other catastrophic nuclear incidents.

'Remarkable . . . grips with the force of a thriller' Robert Macfarlane 'The most brilliant and essential book on Chernobyl since that of Nobel Prize-winner Svetlana Alexievich' Irish Times ** National Book Critics Circle Finalist 2019 ** The official death toll of the 1986 Chernobyl accident, 'the worst nuclear disaster in history', is only 54, and stories today commonly suggest that nature is thriving there. Yet award-winning historian Kate Brown uncovers a much more disturbing story, one in which radioactive isotopes caused hundreds of thousands of casualties, and the magnitude of the disaster has been actively suppressed. For years after, Soviet scientists, bureaucrats and civilians were documenting staggering increases in birth defects, child mortality, cancers and other life-altering diseases. Worried that this evidence would blow the lid on the effects of radiation release from Cold War weapons-testing, scientists and diplomats from international organizations, including the UN, tried to bury or discredit it. Brown also encounters many everyday heroes, often women, who fought to bring attention to the ballooning human and ecological catastrophe, and adapt to life in a post-nuclear landscape, where the dangerous effects of radiation persist today. Based on a decade of archival and on-the-ground research, Manual for Survival is a gripping historical detective story that brings to light the real consequences of Chernobyl - and the plot to cover them up. 'A troubling book, passionately written and deeply researched' Sunday Times