Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

 

Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety by Eric Schlosser is a frightening book.  Schlosser shows us how closely we have come to major accidents with nuclear weapons and/or accidental nuclear war.  The takeaway is that we have been very lucky – and that our luck could easily run out.

The nature of complex and dangerous systems is that they are so closely tied together, their systems so intertwined that even a simple error can lead to a cascade of critical events. These kinds of accidents are hard to anticipate or control. This book is a series of case studies of this dangerous phenomenon.

It is far too late

 

Photographing the Holocaust: Interpretations of the Evidence by Janina Struk examines some of the ways photographs were taken in the Holocaust, used as evidence of crimes, as commemorations in museums and exhibits in former camps.  Generally, Struk is appalled at how Holocaust photos have been used since the war.  The lack of context of most images muddles history, and gives Holocaust deniers more fodder.

She is especially interested in how easy it is to access atrocity photographs.  This book was published in 2004.  Now, these photographs are even more accessible.  The cat is out of the bag.  Nothing can be done.  Her final chapter called “Dying for Eternity” critiques the use of photographs from the Lili Jacob album at Birkenau as life-sized displays.  She says the “Nazis took photographs of their victims to humiliate and degrade them.  Are we not colluding with them by displaying them ourselves?”

Perhaps we are, but do we really have a choice?  The standards that Struk sets for displaying Holocaust photographs are so high that they would almost never be shown.  Finally, it is too late to have such scruples.  The photographic image in 2004 is a very different entity in 2022.

Under The Skin by Michel Faber

 

Under The Skin by Michel Faber should not really work.  The book only has one central idea, and one character who is three-dimensional.   So much of the central idea is hackneyed, it is a wonder this novel works at all.  But Faber has pulled it off – to his credit.  Faber’s talent is self-evident in this strange and captivating novel.  He is able to take shop-worn tools and make them work. 

A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution

 

A Story of Us: A New Look at Human Evolution by Lesley Newson and Peter Richerson indeed do, as the subtitle suggests, takes a new look at the evolution of our species.  

They do this in two ways.  In the first, they take a mixed narrative and scientific approach to our ancestry.  They tell the ‘story’ of a particular hominid with little authorial commentary.  They want to give us a sense of what life was like for our ape-like ancestors as a pure story.  

In the second method, they take more of a scientific approach, but with a decidedly different approach than traditionally taken.  Rather than the strictly natural selection angle, the authors realize that our success as a species is because of our culture; and our culture developed along with us.  This culture stressed cooperation rather than competition (at least within a species or a group within that species).  From this angle, the story of females and their children is more important and is predominantly featured.  

The main title is clever as well: this is “a” story of us, not “the” story of us.  The authors do not believe there is something like human nature: there is nothing fixed about being human.  We are constantly evolving adapting, changing.  Therefore this is only one story of our origins but by no means the only story.

Hiroshima

 

John Hersey’s Hiroshima is one of the finest pieces of journalism of the twentieth century. Before this article ran in the New Yorker, Americans knew some dry facts and figures about the bombing of Hiroshima.  But Hersey’s novelistic approach made the bombing less abstract.  By following the fate of six people, he gave all the victims a human face.  This book is probably the first fully articulated “no-nukes” protest work, although it is presented as pure reportage (and it is) and never presents a lesson.  But the fundamental decency and honesty of his reporting could not fail to convey a corrective message about the horrors of nuclear weapons.  

Between East & West

 

Between East and West: Across the Borderlands of Europe by Anne Applebaum was written by the author during her travels in Eastern Europe right after the fall of the Soviet Union. Appelbaum was young at the time, and her youth is reflected in the tone of this book.  She spends a great deal of time showing the people she interacts with within in a negative, even ludicrous light.  After decades of communism, the people she meets are beaten down and ignorant of the wider world.  Applebaum does not write their stories in light of this fact; she lacks compassion and understanding.  She is, however, an excellent writer, and the stories she tells are compelling, even if they are unfair.  The world she visited is long gone, even if many of its problems still remain.

After One-Hundred-and-Twenty: Reflecting on Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in the Jewish Tradition

 

Hillel Halkin’s After One-Hundred-and-Twenty: Reflecting on Death, Mourning, and the Afterlife in the Jewish Tradition (Library of Jewish Ideas Book 9) is a decent exploration of Jewish conceptions of life after death from the Bible to the present.  Halkin is one of the great Jewish thinkers and writers of this time, so this is a good book.  However, I would have liked this book to have been a more intellectual treatment of Jewish eschatology, and less about Halkin’s personal experiences related to death and dying.  As it is, there is not nearly enough written on the topic – and even Jews very well versed in the books and traditions of the faith find this subject confusing and opaque.