Rating: 
Summary: great book
Review: Reading this book on a plane back from India, I admired the way the author was able to blend in the texture of the city and all the different forces at work: from people struggling for their daily existence to the enthusiastic engineers who built the plant .From cursory knowledge of the incident, I always thought that Union Carbide skimped when building the plant--not installing adequate safety measures, etc. I also had read carbide literature which blames the accident on sabotage, tea breaks, and other nonsense. Lapierre gives a balanced view and shows how the plant, which was initially closely monitored, was allowed to deteriorate in order to save costs. What makes the book worth reading is the people--especially the heroism of people during the night of the tragedy, amazing. Definitely worth reading.
Rating:
Summary: Amazing and accurate research
Review: The book starts telling two different stories. One is about an Indian family of peasants which, after a period of dry weather, is forced to abandon their land and to move in the suburbia of Bhopal. The other is about the Union Carbide, a huge American chemical company, which, at the beginning of the Sixties, decides to enter the Indian market of pesticides with its new product called Sevin. In order to accomplish its goal, the Union Carbide builds a factory near the suburbia of Bhopal. In this way, the two separate stories start to tie one with the other. They melt in a single story that ends with the tragic chemical accident that happened at the Bhopal plant of the Union Carbide, the night between the 2nd and the 3rd of December 1984, causing 30.000 deaths and 500.000 injured. I think the author did a very accurate research work. Every character is fully described and every fact is well documented. The great quantity of details gives an astonishing realism to every phase of the story.
Rating: 
Summary: Disappointing story of the tragedy in Bhopal
Review: The story itself is riveting and tragic, but the writing is so overly melodramatic, it dissipates the impact of the horrific events in Bhopal. The authors, for some reason, seemed to think that hammering away at the poverty of the victims is supposed to make the reader feel even *more* sorry for them. What it does instead is rob the victims of their dignity by making them seem "poor but happy"...shades of the colonial voice. And the over-the-top prose used to describe characters in the bustees is enough to make one wish for Dickens' more inhibited character descriptions. The stories told of sweet little Pamini, noble Belram Mukkadam, and the other Indians are one-sided and flat. There are no complex characters here, in spite of these having been real people living in horrible circumstances. Another fault is the lack of physical description. The authors never explain why a train would pull into the Bhopal station, now full of dead and expiring people, and actually stop instead of going on. The chemical plant is never adequately described. The entire city of Bhopal is not adequately described. The reader is thrown some colonial history and that's it. Reading the book was like reading through a cardboard tube, and about as illuminating. This was a deeply disappointing book.
Rating: 
Summary: Portrait of a senseless tragedy...
Review: This book expertly tells the story of the disaster that occurred in Bhopal, India in December 1984. This disaster, which occurred following a gas leak from a Union Carbide plant, claimed the lives of 16000 to 30000 people. In this book, the author gives the story of the tragedy beginning with the planning of the factory to the present day and includes details on the present whereabouts and situations of the main characters. While the book details a profoundly tragic situation, I came to a different conclusion than the author. It is the author's conclusion that the tragedy was avoidable and an act of criminality on the part of Union Carbide. However, after reading the words of the author, I came to the conclusion that the gas leak was an accident of terrible, epic proportion. Perhaps in the end this does not matter anyway. Regardless, the book does tell the tragic story of the senseless loss of life that occurred in Bhopal.
Rating: 
Summary: Disaster of a book
Review: This is a bad book. In here you will find cliches like "they were dropping like flies" and they "ran like the wind"--a cliche repeated twice in a five-page span. In here you will find dialogue that never resembles real human speech and clumsy phrasing that gets caught in your throat. In here you will find a cover photograph (a happy and healthy Indian woman) that has nothing to do with the story. And in here you will find lazy reporting that fills 300 of its 360 pages with the obvious events and characters leading up to the disaster. It's diversion after diversion, and before too long those speed-reading classes you took in high school come in handy. A good writer could have captured in 80 pages the essentials leading up to the disaster; a writer who knows something about the precision, music, and transparency of words could have conveyed the disaster itself in another 50 pages; and, if there were a true, dogged journalist at work, the rest of the book could have focused on Union Carbide in the 18 years since 1984: where is Warren Anderson? why such meager settlements? how did Union Carbide get away without any criminal charges? and what about the poisons still in the air and water and soil of Bhopal? The authors were handed a ready-made story full of death and heroes and evil in a land of great color and divinity--yet still they botched the book. It's sad, because this enormous tragedy and these maligned people deserve the best in reporting and in justice and in the transformative capacity of words. They get none of that in this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Marginal prose reveals powerful, enraging story
Review: When a cruise missile destroys a target, there is a certain level of responsibility on Raytheon, the manufacturer. That type of corporate complicity though, is subservient to the lion's share of the blame which would go to the government that uses the cruise missile. In the case of Union Carbide, no such opportunities to share the blame exist. The deaths of up to 30,000 people lie directly at the door of the company as has been made clear in several books, Five Past Midnight in Bhopal being the most recent. It is unfortunate that the massacre perpetrated in Bhopal is given only a marginal telling here. The story is fairly compelling and it does have a creeping sense of doom as ones reads it. Often times though, the authors drop into cliché and melodrama. Many of the people in the book are revealed as one-dimensional, polarizing the guilty and innocent. If the victims of the crime were thugs of some sort, their characters should remain irrelevant. The same should go for those who are largely decent people, painting them as angelic does nothing to further the quest for justice against Union Carbide (since absorbed by Rhône-Poulenc and Dow Chemical). It's merely an attempt to tug at the heartstrings of the reader, of whom only the most imbecilic or callous would fail to identify with the victim and convict the perpetrator. That is not to say that the authors should not have tried to give the victims names and personalities, only that the way it is done here is often times unbearable. When it does come through though, it's effective. Drawing a depth of character that allows the reader to focus on what exactly the cost is going to be to these people, one can feel a bit of personal loss with the victims. The other main flaw that comes to mind is one that might have been identified by one of the blurbs on the back cover. In the book A Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger gives thoughts, actions and motives (even dialogue) to people after all communication from them had been cut off. This was done despite the fact there is absolutely zero reason to think that any of it happened or that the characters were even alive at that point. Passing such tripe off as nonfiction is repulsive. When there is some evidence that might help recreate the last moments of people, as in Bhopal where the bodies of the killed were available at the time, there can be a limited amount of reasonable supposition. In the case of Five Past Midnight in Bhopal, this reviewer thinks the authors stretched a bit beyond reasonable credulity. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, the authors have recounted a piece of history and found to put the blame where most others have as well. Perhaps the melodrama and angel-raising could have been cut a bit to provide a better glimpse about the struggle for justice in the time since the mass-killing but that decision belongs to the authors, not to me. Reliable estimates put the total number of fatalities from the gassing of Bhopal higher than the number of Kurds gassed at Halabja by Saddam Hussein in one of his more famous crimes. The mens rea is clear for both crimes, one through direct malice, and one through reckless behavior that reasonable people could expect to lead to death. This is well established using Union Carbide's own materials. The safety reports convict the company on their own yet, justice is conspicuously absent to the people of Bhopal, with the complicity of the American government and the offensive lack or personal responsibility on the part of the Warren Anderson and the others chiefs of Union Carbide. Five Past Midnight in Bhopal gives a good account of the events and the behavior that lead up to the worst industrial catastrophe in history, it unfortunately does so with marginal storytelling ability and prose.
Rating:
Summary: Marginal prose reveals powerful, enraging story
Review: When a cruise missile destroys a target, there is a certain level of responsibility on Raytheon, the manufacturer. That type of corporate complicity though, is subservient to the lion's share of the blame which would go to the government that uses the cruise missile. In the case of Union Carbide, no such opportunities to share the blame exist. The deaths of up to 30,000 people lie directly at the door of the company as has been made clear in several books, Five Past Midnight in Bhopal being the most recent. It is unfortunate that the massacre perpetrated in Bhopal is given only a marginal telling here. The story is fairly compelling and it does have a creeping sense of doom as ones reads it. Often times though, the authors drop into cliché and melodrama. Many of the people in the book are revealed as one-dimensional, polarizing the guilty and innocent. If the victims of the crime were thugs of some sort, their characters should remain irrelevant. The same should go for those who are largely decent people, painting them as angelic does nothing to further the quest for justice against Union Carbide (since absorbed by Rhône-Poulenc and Dow Chemical). It's merely an attempt to tug at the heartstrings of the reader, of whom only the most imbecilic or callous would fail to identify with the victim and convict the perpetrator. That is not to say that the authors should not have tried to give the victims names and personalities, only that the way it is done here is often times unbearable. When it does come through though, it's effective. Drawing a depth of character that allows the reader to focus on what exactly the cost is going to be to these people, one can feel a bit of personal loss with the victims. The other main flaw that comes to mind is one that might have been identified by one of the blurbs on the back cover. In the book A Perfect Storm, Sebastian Junger gives thoughts, actions and motives (even dialogue) to people after all communication from them had been cut off. This was done despite the fact there is absolutely zero reason to think that any of it happened or that the characters were even alive at that point. Passing such tripe off as nonfiction is repulsive. When there is some evidence that might help recreate the last moments of people, as in Bhopal where the bodies of the killed were available at the time, there can be a limited amount of reasonable supposition. In the case of Five Past Midnight in Bhopal, this reviewer thinks the authors stretched a bit beyond reasonable credulity. Nevertheless, when all is said and done, the authors have recounted a piece of history and found to put the blame where most others have as well. Perhaps the melodrama and angel-raising could have been cut a bit to provide a better glimpse about the struggle for justice in the time since the mass-killing but that decision belongs to the authors, not to me. Reliable estimates put the total number of fatalities from the gassing of Bhopal higher than the number of Kurds gassed at Halabja by Saddam Hussein in one of his more famous crimes. The mens rea is clear for both crimes, one through direct malice, and one through reckless behavior that reasonable people could expect to lead to death. This is well established using Union Carbide's own materials. The safety reports convict the company on their own yet, justice is conspicuously absent to the people of Bhopal, with the complicity of the American government and the offensive lack or personal responsibility on the part of the Warren Anderson and the others chiefs of Union Carbide. Five Past Midnight in Bhopal gives a good account of the events and the behavior that lead up to the worst industrial catastrophe in history, it unfortunately does so with marginal storytelling ability and prose.
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