PD Smith

Of Minds and Men

14 November 2007 | Doomsday Men, Haber, WMD, WW1, WW2 | 2 comments

The Aus­tralian Lit­er­ary Review has pub­lished a review of Dooms­day Men. It’s by Richard King and is well worth read­ing. Here’s an extract:

“…for those with the time and incli­na­tion to get their heads around nuclear physics, with its dizzy­ing inter­min­gling of the mas­sive and the infin­i­tes­i­mal, then P. D. Smith’s Dooms­day Men is as good a place to start as any. Despite its rather tit­il­lat­ing title and the schlock-hor­ror gaudi­ness of its fifties-style cov­er, Smith’s is a huge­ly inter­est­ing his­to­ry of some huge­ly dif­fi­cult sub­ject mat­ter, in which the alche­my of nuclear fis­sion and fusion is mere­ly part of a wider sto­ry stretch­ing back to the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry… Smith is no less fas­ci­nat­ing on the pre-his­to­ry of weapons of mass destruc­tion, from the chem­i­cal weapons of the First World War, to Japan’s exper­i­ments with bio­log­i­cal weapon­ry, to the bomb­ing of Ger­man and Japan­ese cities (the accounts of which are scarce­ly less har­row­ing than the accounts of the effects of the atom bomb).”

You can read the rest on the author’s blog here.

2 comments so far:

  1. Clare D | 15 November 2007

    Excel­lent review — real­ly infor­ma­tive and, yes, I agree, well worth read­ing.

  2. PD Smith | 15 November 2007

    Thanks Clare — good to hear from you!