Five Past Midnight in Bhopal

April 22, 2002
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.

April 15, 2002
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2002, American Library Association.)