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Wstrząsający, oparty na własnych doświadczeniach autora i jego rodziny, opis wywołanego przez stalinowski ZSRR wielkiego głodu (Hołodomor) w Ukrainie w latach 1932-32. Jak pisze w posłowiu tłumacz Maciej Piotrowski "do zbrodni tej doprowadzono poprzez sztuczne stworzenie warunków skutkujących masowymi zgonami wśród mieszkańców Ukraińskiej SSR". Wykorzystując niski urodzaj 1932 roku władze radzieckie dodatkowo podniosły normy przymusowych dostaw produkcji rolnej od gospodarstw prywatnych, których w Ukrainie była wówczas większość, i egzekwowały je w sposób absolutnie bezwzględny, dosłownie nie pozostawiając rodzinom rolniczym nic do jedzenia. Rekwirowano także wszystko co pomagało się samodzielnie wyżywić - zwierzęta, urządzenia rolnicze czy nawet żarna. Rolnikom nie sprzedawano ziarna siewnego (a ich własne zapasy odebrano), a do tego całą Ukraińską SSR oddzielono od reszty Związku szczelnym kordonem, a tych rolników, którym udało się przez niego przedostać wyłapywano w okolicznych republikach i wywożono na Syberię lub zabijano na miejscu. Warto mieć świadomość, że gdyby w 1920 nie udało się powstrzymać ofensywy Armii Czerwonej na Polskę to polskie rolnictwo indywidualne czekałby prawdopodobnie ten sam los.

The book is really an eye-opener about nuclear fusion in general, and ITER project specifically. Something that I was barely aware of before, and associated it mostly with basic research, important but of little relevance to daily life, and surrounded by the "always 10 years ahead" mythology, turned into a project that is actually at the centre of world's energy transformation. The best thing about the book is that it's interdisciplinary - Claessens offers a high-level view on the whole ecosystem in which any electricity producing industry operates (supply chain, logistics, operations, grid balancing, thermal generation etc etc), presents these parts that are very specific to nuclear fusion, and then dives into each of these topics in great detail. Out of that picture nuclear fusion comes out as something that actually has potential to revolutionize world's energy generation in low-carbon, low-resources and clean way and even though challenging, it is entirely feasible. Nuclear fusion does work and has been done dozens of times worldwide, the main struggle here is to make it economic enough for mass use for electricity generation, but the challenges are very specific ones, for example around material engineering, reactor design and such. The ITER project at the same time, at least in my popular media fed perception, was upgraded from a niche research project to a key component in the whole nuclear fusion puzzle, with all the delays it faced being caused by a number of reasons. But the primary cause being that ITER was never designed as a power plant, as we might have expected, but from the beginning designed as an interdisciplinary and international research project, and also one of the most complex in the world. If we look at ITER as such, so essentially something closer to CERN than to a highly targeted commercial project, then the reasons for all the delays became much more understandable. For example, Claessens describes how it took 10 years only to agree on the reactor design, as international participants came up with dozens of proposed designs which had to be thoroughly discussed in a strictly scientific rather than commercial project atmosphere - but all that is within the design objectives of the whole project. With ITER going "first plasma" in 2026, I see it quite feasible that the next stage called START, which are much more purpose-oriented (it's designed to actually output electricity, unlike ITER) will come much faster now.