Just finished (finally!) Eric Schlosser's new book, Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety. I am writing a formal review of it for Physics Today (which should be out soon), but just as a preliminary thing for you guys, I will say: I was super impressed with it. He did his homework. He thought about the issues involved in a very serious way. He mastered both the secondary and primary literature. He gets deep into the details but can also see the trees. He's non-moralizing even when he points out some of the really detrimental, self-defeating, and dangerous aspects of military mis-handling of nuclear arms and nuclear strategy. It has no whiff of an activist screed; it is serious stuff. I found very few obvious errors (and while the ones I found irked me personally, they were pretty minor — e.g. he misunderstands Szilard's initial bomb idea, he gives the wrong neutron initiator size for the first atomic bomb wrong). It is not quite academic history, in terms of genre, but it is an excellent work, and in some ways its journalist-influenced aspects makes it even better (it is a fun read, if you find nuclear weapons accidents fun). If you read one new book on nuclear weapons history, this is the one to read.

I have been meaning to ask this to historians but didn't think this question would be suitible as this is a book request: Can you guys help me find some good books that examines battle strategies? Thanks.

My peer reviews ask for the insertion of historiography I am trying to logic out, because we do not divide it up the way this scholar does. Basically they want me to address debates that involve "new social history" (not pomo!) vs. Marxian analysis but not in that way. I am not fully sure what to do there, but as a result I have been reading lots of slap fights and a few real beatings about rural class formation in 19th c. South Africa. I want to dispense with it quickly but it is turning into a fresh wave of historiographical research.

On the other hand, seeing the screeds passed between Tim Keegan and Martin Murray is shocking (in the Journal of S African Studies in 1989) is entertaining. The Radical History Review even engaged it all. But the salience of dredging up 25 year old arguments in a new ms is not entirely clear, unless I really oversimplify them. For now, I guess I'll just keep reading the screeds. It does explain why certain scholars don't appear together.

I'm currently reading The Art of Not Being Governed by James Scott, and it's fascinating. It looks at culture groups existing outside of state control as they developed in relation to state cultures in Southeast Asia. I'm only a couple chapters into it, but it's a fascinating way to look at state formation and center-periphery relationships. It also really humanizes premodern history in that it moves its discussion from institutions to the actions of people responding to other people - which really should be a self-evident way of looking at history, though especially in studies of state formation, people just tend to fall to the wayside somehow. I would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in state formation and multicultural relationships, not just in Asia.

Well the research I am working on is explanation of the Phoenicia's role in the creation of the Greek Mediterranean polis culture. I am mostly looking at their economic role in the Greek poleis but there are definitely some social and political connections between the Greeks and the Phoenicians that are present too.

So I am currently reading Phoenicians and the West by Maria Aubet and reading about the emporia of the Mediterranean and how the Greeks and Phoenicians were incorporated into them. So I was wondering if anyone knew of a good monograph about the Western Mediterranean Greeks during the Greek Archaic Period?

So I'm working on a three credit research paper right now under the general topic of American Military History and I finally settled down on looking at the decision by Truman to drop the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'm in the early stages right now, just really starting to dig in to primary documents. I would love any secondary source recommendations, or primary sources that you think I should take a look at! Or how about any questions you've always wondered about but never really seen much of an answer on

Slightly late, but at some point in the near future I'm going to be cracking open The Corrupting Sea. Does anyone have any thoughts on that book?

I've been reading Norman Davies' Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe. I can't really tell how I feel about the book thus far: it's interesting stuff, but it doesn't feel like it's going in depth. It seems like it sits somewhere between a pop history and a more academic work.

I would be curious to get other people's opinions of this book, or of Davies' work in general. I like him, but as an Anglophile and a Polonophile, his biases kind of hit my buttons, so it's more difficult for me to judge.

The research I'm currently working on is looking at the selection of the defendants before the IMT at Nuremberg, which is surprisingly under-analysed it seems. All the focus seems to be on the negotiations to draft the IMT Charter and not so much on who was actually (or wasn't) indicted.

Which is both good because there's scope for doing something at least marginally original, but bad because generally its not talked about in any depth.

This week I've been reading through Colin Wells' "Sailing from Byzantium" thanks to a recommendation on this sub. I particularly have enjoyed reading about the back and forth in the early renaissance and how Greek language got re-injected into the West.

I also started reading Martin Marty's "The Christian World: A Global History". I have to write up a course on the first 1000 years of Christian history and I'm looking at some possible secondary sources to give a less Eurocentric perspective and this was recommended to me.

And once I get this week over with I will be back to some research.