Hersey's Hiroshima invented the method: report a catastrophe of unimaginable scale by following a small number of ordinary survivors in close, plain detail, and keep the reporter out of it. Alexievich's book on Chernobyl is that method taken further. She removes the connecting narration almost entirely and lets hundreds of interviewed voices carry it, opening with a firefighter's widow. Both books make the same wager, which is that the statistic cannot be felt and one person's account can, and both were written against an official version that preferred the statistic.