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!

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