PD Smith

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.

I've just reviewed Martin Goodman's wonderful biography of J.S. Haldane for the Times. Here's the first paragraph of the review:

'Early one freezing January morning in 1896, a massive explosion ripped through the Tylorstown Colliery in the Rhondda Valley. The force of the explosion blew the roof off pitshaft number 7 and sent a “black tornado of dust up through the shafts”. A quick count of the missing miners’ lamps suggested that more than 100 men were below. In addition, there were the boys, known as “the trappers”, employed to open and close the thick wooden doors in the pitch-black tunnels.'

Read the rest here.

And as a postscript to Strangeloves, there's a really great page of links to everything and anything to do with Stanley Kubrick here.

Enjoy.