The Written Nerd

Happy holiday Monday, everyone (unless you work in retail, of course). I'm taking the day off from blogging and ceding book review duties to everyone's favorite, the ALP. * * * Back when I was in high school, I somehow stumbled across the Black Lizard edition of Jim Thompson's After Dark, My Sweet . I don't know how I came across it. I may have thought the book was about vampires or something. Anyway, back then, most of the Black Lizard books had a uniform look: a blurry black and white cover photo with bars of vivid color criss-crossing the photo. The covers had a matte finish that gave them a pleasingly thick and slightly pebbled feel, like really high-quality old paper. The look was distinct and badass. It had a lurid and pulpy edge, appropriate to the contents, but the quality of presentation also suggested something lasting and enduring. As physical objects, these books were a perfect manifestation of the publisher's philosophy that these unjustly neglected ge...

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...