The Written Nerd

Greetings literature lovers. The ALP here with some dispatches from that other pile of books on the purely metaphorical nightstand. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed that Book Nerd, within her "About Me" sidebar section, claims that I read everything she doesn't. Here's what Book Nerd hasn't read recently. Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race , by Richard Rhodes With his Pulitzer-winning 1986 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb and his 1995 follow up, Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb , Rhodes pretty much staked out the nuclear era as his personal stomping ground. In his latest, Arsenals of Folly , he moves from the dawn of the Cold War Era into the lingering last days of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the end of the arms race. Where Atomic played like a tragic Promethean foundation myth and Dark Sun was steeped in the shadowy cloak and dagger paranoia of the early Cold War, Arsenals reads like a grotesque farce. Late in the E