Andrew Blackwell

This book is based on a simple but brilliant idea: to hang out in the most polluted and toxic places on the planet. Well it’s a brilliant idea for a book at any rate, if not a holiday

[Andrew Blackwell] has seen the worst we can do to ourselves, met the best of us trying to repair the damage, and discovered – mystifyingly at times – beauty in the planetary dark side

This is one of the best concepts for a non-fiction book I have come across in some time ... There is a great deal of acute observation, proper thinking and challenging material in each of the journeys

An essential read. A very funny - and very disturbing - look at some parts of our world that need to be acknowledged. Visit Sunny Chernobyl is my new favorite guidebook to some places I admit to have visited

A certain amount of depression and anger does result from reading Andrew Blackwell’s Visit Sunny Chernobyl, but Blackwell is such a good and amusing travel writer, such an engaging companion around the awfulness, that you’ll also come away somewhat entertained

Blackwell is a very good writer, with laconic, graphic and gently ironic style, at times reminiscent of both Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway …Visit Sunny Chernobyl inspires rather than scares

A wise, witty travel adventure that packs a punch - and one of the most entertaining and informative books I've read in years. Visit Sunny Chernobyl is a joy to read and will make you think

Every now and again a ray of sunshine lifts the usual gloom-and-doom of environmental crises and this witty, warm and refreshingly honest tour of the netherworld of modern life offers a particularly bright one ... Andrew Blackwell wades into the world's worst pollution hotspots with an engaging combination of curiosity and open-mindedness. This is much more than a guide book to ecological devastation. It is a moving and often hilarious story of human dignity rising above unimaginable squalor

David Shukman, Science Editor, BBC News, and author of An Iceberg as Big as Manhattan

Adventures in the World’s Most Polluted Places

The lifeless moonscape of Canada's oil sand strip mines. 
 
A vast vortex of plastic floating endlessly around the Pacific. 
 
An eerie abandoned town square in a radioactive Ukrainian wilderness. 
 
These are the places the tourist boards would rather you didn't see. The places that don't show up in any guide books. And the places that, six years ago, journalist and film-maker Andrew Blackwell set out to explore. Visit Sunny Chernobyl is the wry, funny, sometimes poignant tale of his trip through the world's most degraded environments.

Andrew Blackwell

Praise for Visit Sunny Chernobyl

This book is based on a simple but brilliant idea: to hang out in the most polluted and toxic places on the planet. Well it’s a brilliant idea for a book at any rate, if not a holiday