Book review: Visit Sunny Chernobyl, Andrew Blackwell Random House, £12.99 THIS is a one of the best concepts for a non-fiction book I've come across in some time. While living in India, Andrew Blackwell visited Kanpur, a city with a population of about three million, which did not appear in either the Lonely Planet or the Rough Guide books. It was, according to the Indian Government, the most polluted city in the country. The book comprises seven journeys to places with similar reputations, and Blackwell attempts to find "something inscrutably, mystifyingly beautiful" in these places while being aware of the dangers of becoming an "environmental rubbernecker." There is a tension at the outset between these aims. On the one hand, Blackwell assiduously notes the environmental politics that lie behind the dim public awareness of Chernobyl, the oil sands fields in Alberta, the refineries of Port Arthur, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the soy fields replacing rainforest in the Amazon, the coal-dust covered city of Linfen in Shanxi Province, and the transformation of the Yamuna River around New Delhi into an open sewer. On the other, he is committed to a kind of aesthetic appreciation of these places. There is a diffusion of focus between "eerily beautiful because of" and "eerily beautiful in spite of." At times Blackwell adopts the slightly swaggering, over-empathic style reminiscent of glossy men's magazines. Introducing the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, he writes "Let's nip this in the bud: It's not an island. I'd like to say that again. It's not. An Island. Or as a precursor to a tour into the Exclusion Zone, he says "You can skip this section if you want, but you'll miss the part where I tell you the one weird old tip for repelling gamma rays," with the inevitable punchline a few pages later, "Oh - and the tip for repelling gamma rays is that you can't." Such infelicities are doubly disappointing since there is a great deal of acute observation, proper thinking and challenging material in each of the journeys. There is a fantastic sequence on the pollution of the Yamuna, where the irony that rivers have a sacred function in Hindu cosmogonies becomes part of the problem. Since the river is holy, and therefore inherently pure, no amount of faeces pumped into it can eradicate that sacral nature. Perhaps the most shocking part is when he takes a plane ride to witness the oil sand extraction sites near Fort MacMurray: there is an awful realisation that what has occurred is not some wound or defacement or rupture into the landscape. The landscape itself has gone, entirely, scooped away and sifted out into the crucial hydrocarbons. Although Blackwell mentions Edward Burtynsky in passing as the paradigmatic artist of the denatured landscape, more could have been done with this material. The Onion, the satirical American website, skewered this precisely: "After spending more than a century exploiting urban decay to create deeply moving, socially conscious works of art, the art world announced Tuesday that it had captured all the beauty it was going to find in rusted-out cars, abandoned houses, and condemned industrial sites." Nevertheless, urban exploration artists have created truly haunting images of Pripyat, the city near Chernobyl, both literally post-apocalyptic and oddly nostalgic. Blackwell's book has enough genuinely interesting material that the reader can overlook its flaws; and the images are online rather than turning the reportage into a coffee-table book about contamination. The absence of images also concentrates the reader on the human stories that punctuate and elaborate the story. In this area, Blackwell excels. From an "Amazon bum" who appeared in a Michael Jackson video, to a Pirate King on board the Pacific trip, to the family in China whose livelihood involves "harvesting" minerals from old computers, the portraits here are unforgettable. "