Spying on the Bomb

Spying on the Bomb - American Nuclear Intelligence from Nazi Germany to Iran and North Korea, by Jeffrey T. Richelson.

The New York Times reviewer said "Richelson writes with admirable clarity."

"His rich material points to issues tht cry out for further analysis," David Holloway wrote in the Times.

Library of Congress Is Missing Things

http://www.readersread.com/cgi-bin/bookblog.pl?bblog=1107071

"Investigators for the congressional library have told lawmakers on a House oversight committee that its review of the retrieval system for the general collection concluded that a 17 percent of materials requested could not be found."

"The number of not-on-shelf books has dropped each year. A quality assurance team in the past several months has reduced that rate to 10 percent," said Deanna Marcum, the associate librarian for library services. Established in 1800, the Library of Congress is one of the world's largest research facilities. It has 135 million items, including almost 20 million books, 59.5 million items in the manuscript division, and nearly 3 million sound recordings and radio and television broadcasts. It has 615 miles of shelving.

Rodric Braithwaite

Braithwaite wrote Moscow 1941. There's a mention in The New Yorker on October 23, 2007. Braithwaite was the UK ambassador to Mosco from 1988 to 1992, and he apparently worked hard on gathering materials for the book, "a symphonic evocation of a great city at war," The New Yorker said.

The Modern World

Joseph J. Ellis reviewed The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World, 1788-1800 in the NY Times. Author Jay Winick has "an uncanny knack for syntheizing the work of others," Ellis wrote. Ellis's fundamental comment on the book is that personalities of political leaders receive too much credit and the underlying forces receive too little emphasis. It sounds like a well done and well conceived book.

Rick Atkinson

Rick Atkinson is working on a trilogy of WW2 books. The Time reviewer referred to "genuinely new materials and perspectives." That's referring to The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944, by Rick Atkinson.


Here is an Atkinson bibliography: see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rick_Atkinson

• (1989) The Long Gray Line. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-48008-6.
• (1993) Crusade: The Untold Story of the Persian Gulf War. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-60290-4.
• (2002) An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa, 1942-1943. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-6288-2.
• (2004) In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-7561-5.
• (2007) The Day of Battle: The War in Sicily and Italy, 1943-1944. New York: Henry Holt. ISBN 0-8050-6289-0.

The Army at Dawn won a Pulitzer Prize. http://www.pulitzer.org/year/2003/history/works/

Charles Darwin

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452288886/ref=pe_5050_7289230_pe_snp_886

At Amazon, they're promoting a new paperback version of Darwin's The Descent of Man: The Concise Edition.

Concise is good, considering how Victorian Darwin was. We might describe him as long-winded by today's short-attention-span standards. But there is a lot to like about Darwin. He was an amateur before know-it-all professional experts got the public to believe that experts know everything and ordinary citizens know nothing.

In part because he married his wealthy cousin (they were part of the family that became wealthy making Wedgewood china), Darwin had the luxury of being able to devote himself to interesting projects without having to worry about getting paid for them. He had his basic idea at a relatively young age, like most scientists, apparently. But he mulled over the idea and let it gestate. He spent a long time gathering evidence and collecting his thoughts into a well articulated and coherent statement. In part Origin of Species is so long because he had collected so much data to support the thesis. Our country would be better off if we had more people who devoted themselves to collecting data to support interesting theories. It doesn't happen often now. Maybe it happened rarely in the past, too. Anyway, I think we lack people like Darwin who are careful about making bold assertions and who make bold assertions after gathering a lot of evidence. I admire Darwin.



http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/2300
www.infidels.org/library/historical/charles_darwin/descent_of_man/ - 10k -
http://www.literature.org/authors/darwin-charles/the-descent-of-man/
ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/d/darwin/charles/d22d/

This site purports to be the complete works of Charles Darwin online: http://darwin-online.org.uk/contents.html

achronoliterate v. aliterate

This was in Anu Garg's AWADMail dated November 11:

From: William Abbott (wbabbott3 comcast.net)
Subject: Re: A.Word.A.Day--aliterate
Refer: http://wordsmith.org/words/aliterate.html

Maybe I am an achronoliterate (I made that up), someone who does not
have enough time to read everything that he wants to read!



If there's a word for a person who is interested in reading but doesn't have enough time to read all the books he wants to read, then it must be a pretty common phenomenon. This came up in the context of the word "aliterate," which Garg says is a person who can read but is not interested enough to do so.