Spook news

The US Intelligence Community

by Jeffrey T Richelson (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0813343623/ref=pe_606_8908990_pe_ar_t1


A Century of Spies: Intelligence in the Twentieth Century by Jeffery T. Richelson
http://www.amazon.com/Century-Spies-Intelligence-Twentieth/dp/019511390X/ref=pd_bxgy_b_text_b

http://books.google.com/books?id=HohPaIyc5G0C&dq=Richelson+spies&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=5f9NU6GnuC&sig=C2m-Tka5x-3r8xlZNguAlLIcdDo&hl=en&ei=N00fSt6QMOOptgerv5HWCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1

http://www.oup.com/us/catalog/general/subject/HistoryWorld/Modern/?ci=9780195113907&view=usa

Amazon lists this book at #167,304 on May 27, 2009.

Life Science news

Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life (Hardcover)

by Carl Zimmer (Author)

Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins
Carl Zimmer

Good Germs, Bad Germs: Health and Survival in a Bacterial World
Jessica Snyder Sachs

Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body
Neil Shubin

Comic Book Panic

Book Readings by Columbia Journalism School Prof. David Hajdu, author of "The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America" (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

“Every once in a while, moral panic, innuendo, and fear bubble up from the depths of our culture to create waves of destructive indignation and accusation. David Hajdu's fascinating new book tracks one of the stranger and most significant of these episodes, now forgotten, with exactness, clarity, and serious wit, which is the best kind. He illuminates the lives of his protagonists -- from pompous, on-the-make censors to cracked comic book geniuses -- with his own graphic powers, as well as his intense intellectual curiosity. The book is a rarity, vividly depicting a noirish 1950's America but without a trace of irony or nostalgia.” --Sean Wilentz, Professor of History, Princeton University

April 3: Boston, 6:00 p.m., Harvard Book Store, 40 Brattle Street, Cambridge, Mass.

April 7: Washington, DC, 7:00 p.m., Politics & Prose, 5015 Connecticut Avenue, N.W.

April 10: New York City, 7:00 p.m., Book Culture, 536 West 112^th Street

April 12: Easton, Penn., 2:00 p.m., Barnes & Noble, 4445 Southmont Way

April 17: Seattle, Wa., 7:30 p.m., Nextbook, Downstairs at Town Hall, 1119 8^th Avenue

April 19: Syracuse, N.Y., 2:00 p.m., Barnes & Noble, 3454 Erie Blvd. East, Dewitt, N.Y.

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.