这是一本另类的历史书，关于被历史遗忘、边缘化，或忽视的地方。你知道哈萨克斯坦跟美国蒙大拿州有什么共同之处吗？原来两个地方都有一个被毁灭过的采矿小镇，这两个地方的天候、人口以及历史其实非常相似。这本书带着读者进入这些被遗忘的小地方，书中充满了非常人性以及难忘的故事，让我们更能够了解一个地方的历史以及人物。
 
作者带着我们到异化的切尓诺贝利区（Chernobyl Zone of Alienation），首先是线上，接着实际上去拜访，看哪一个版本——真实还是虚拟的——是伪造的。她带着我们到美国西雅图的一个地下室，在这里检查在1942年的日裔美国人在被送去集中营之前被留下的私人物品。在乌克兰，我们跟着作者躲在一棵树里面，只为了目睹在当地哈西德派犹太人的女士禁止的犹太信念庆祝会。到了俄罗斯的南部，作者跟Kyshtym这个小城市的居民讨论隐形辐射污染物体如何妨害了他们的生活。最后，作者回到了伊利诺斯州，美国中西部的工业中心，调查所谓的“rustalgia”。

这本书充满动人的当地故事，是多年来被使沉默、被打碎或者被污染过的历史。这些少为人知的故事展现了人类在被抛弃以及遗忘之后的生存力量。


关于作者：
Kate Brown是美国马里兰大学的历史教授。她写过的书包括
Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland 以及 Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters。
 
好评：
Alastair Bonnett, author of Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies
“Melancholic but always fascinating Brown's journeys to some of the world’s furthest and most fragile destinations help us explore the meaning of place and memory and, along the way, subtly re-invent the art of the exploration.Dispatches from Dystopia is a compelling and important book.”
 
Charles King, author of Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams
“Brown is among our most visionary historians: a scholar, writer, and traveler who forces us to think of awfulness as a kind of opportunity and emptiness as another kind of thriving. Dispatches from Dystopia should be read by anyone interested in the fate of modernity in places that were once thought to be at its forefront. But it is also a set of essays on the art and science of sense-making: when to go to the archives and when to ignore them, how to hear and smell a place, and why our stories about someone else's past end up being some version of our own.”
 
Library Journal
“Well written, raw, compelling, and seldom boring.”
 
Shelf Awareness
“Brown's book masterfully straddles the line between personal travelogue and academic research. Her essays jump from a war-torn region of Central Asia to a forgotten hotel basement in Seattle, and Brown argues that history is much better served by historians who put themselves in the places they research and the essays they write.”