PD Smith

The Guardian have just print­ed my review of Ein­stein: His Life and Uni­verse
by Wal­ter Isaac­son. Obvi­ous­ly, there have been many excel­lent biogra­phies of the great physi­cist, but Isaac­son explains Einstein’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary physics with an infec­tious enthu­si­asm, mem­o­rably describ­ing his sem­i­nal 1905 work on spe­cial rel­a­tiv­i­ty, On the elec­tro­dy­nam­ics of Mov­ing Bod­ies, as “one of the most spunky and enjoy­able papers in all of sci­ence”.

Isaac­son also had priv­i­leged access to a cache of fam­i­ly cor­re­spon­dence which was kept under lock and key until 2006, in accor­dance with the will of Einstein’s step-daugh­ter Mar­got, so he can righ­ful claim to have new mate­r­i­al. He makes good use of these per­son­al doc­u­ments, although I sus­pect much of inter­est remains. We will have to wait for future vol­umes in Prince­ton’s excel­lent Col­lect­ed Papers for the full pic­ture.

You can read my review here.

There’s a very good review of Dooms­day Men in the cur­rent edi­tion of Nature (vol 448, num­ber 7156). It’s by Gregg Herken, author of the excel­lent study of Oppen­heimer, Teller and Lawrence, Broth­er­hood of the Bomb. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, the review is not avail­able online unless you have a sub­scrip­tion, but here’s the first para­graph:

“There is noth­ing in Man’s indus­tri­al machin­ery but greed and sloth: his heart is in his weapons,” said the Dev­il in George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Super­man. Shaw’s adage could almost be the leit­mo­tiv of P.D. Smith’s well-researched and alto­geth­er depress­ing account of humankind’s long hunt for the ulti­mate super­weapon: a dooms­day device that, by its very ter­ri­ble­ness, would make war forever­more unwinnable, and hence unthink­able. Although we all know how this tale turns out, it is a jour­ney well worth tak­ing. Along the way, Smith includes some fas­ci­nat­ing asides about the men — and it was, almost exclu­sive­ly, a fra­ter­ni­ty — who, in seek­ing to make war obso­lete, have only made it more dead­ly.

Herken con­cludes:

One can only sym­pa­thize with the author’s obser­va­tion that, since the end of the Cold War, glob­al warm­ing and Islamist ter­ror­ism have dis­tract­ed our atten­tion from the weapons that remain in the arse­nals of nations, numer­ous, primed and wait­ing. Although not as dead­ly as Smith’s fic­tive dooms­day bomb, they are cause for us to be more fear­ful, for they are real.

The Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment has just pub­lished my review of Weimar on the Pacif­ic: Ger­man Exile Cul­ture in Los Ange­les and the Cri­sis of Mod­ernism, by Erhard Bahr, a fas­ci­nat­ing book I men­tioned in an ear­li­er post. Here’s the open­ing para­graph:

In 1966, Erhard Bahr stopped his VW Bee­tle at a petrol sta­tion in West­wood, a sub­urb of Los Ange­les. He was en route to take up his first lec­ture­ship at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Los Ange­les, and the car’s back seat was piled high with his books. On top was a col­lec­tion of Thomas Mann’s short sto­ries. This caught the eye of the pump atten­dant who then engaged Bahr in a lengthy dis­cus­sion of The Mag­ic Moun­tain. “I took it as a good omen”, says Bahr in the pref­ace to Weimar on the Pacif­ic, the fruit of thir­ty years’ research into the West Coast’s exile cul­ture.

It’s not yet online but you can read it here.

It’s been a good week for reviews of Dooms­day Men. Joan­na Bourke has writ­ten a very fair and insight­ful piece on it for the Inde­pen­dent today.

Here’s the open­ing para­graph:

“We are right to be afraid. By the mid-20th cen­tu­ry, nuclear physics had cre­at­ed weapons so immense that they dwarfed every­thing that went before. With the drop­ping of the ura­ni­um and plu­to­ni­um bombs on Hiroshi­ma and Nagasa­ki in 1945, sci­en­tif­ic moder­ni­ty had tak­en on a dis­tinct­ly men­ac­ing dimen­sion. In 1952, the first tri­al of the hydro­gen bomb took place. Sci­en­tists such as Robert Oppen­heimer warned Pres­i­dent Tru­man that the new bomb was a ‘weapon of geno­cide’. They alert­ed him that radioac­tiv­i­ty could have ‘glob­al effects’. He paid no atten­tion. Today, many pow­er­ful states pos­sess the capac­i­ty to destroy our world. With­out want­i­ng to min­imise the dan­ger posed by crim­i­nal ter­ror­ists, the real threat to our secu­ri­ty still lies with nuclear-primed gov­ern­ments.”

You can read the rest here.

Christo­pher Cok­er has writ­ten a very pos­i­tive review of Dooms­day Men (“the grip­ping, untold sto­ry of the ulti­mate weapon of mass destruc­tion”) for this week’s Times Lit­er­ary Sup­ple­ment. He writes:

In his film Dr Strangelove, Stan­ley Kubrick did for the Cold War what he had done for space in 2001: he inten­si­fied it, there­by mak­ing it more the­atri­cal and at the same time giv­ing it more depth. It is eas­i­ly the fun­ni­est movie made about glob­al ther­mo-nuclear war, and Strangelove seems not to have lost its bite, even though we think (mis­tak­en­ly) that we have escaped the nuclear age.

Read the rest of Cok­er’s inter­est­ing piece here.