Dispatches from Dystopia

Kate Brown is a fearless historian, having ventured to some of the most dangerous places on the planet. Here, she reflects on her methods, the good and the bad alike, writing with candor, clarity, and panache about her occasionally extreme pursuits of knowledge that is concealed, obscured, or sometimes just hidden in plain sight. Beyond exotic locales such as the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, Kazakhstan, and irradiated villages in Russia, she also visits an unexpectedly archival hotel basement in Seattle and the desolate vistas of the Rust Belt, all the time seeking "the histories of communities and territories that have been silenced, broken, or contaminated.” Throughout, she writes in a self-reflective, honest, and engaging voice that doesn’t disguise her own involvement--as in her conflicted evocation of her childhood in unlovely Elgin, Illinois. When she falls short or has doubts about what she’s doing or how she’s doing it, she doesn’t conceal those moments. Instead, Brown forces us to notice how we assign value to the things we do and how our own stories are shaped as a result.