| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Atomic Culture: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. Ed. by Scott C. Zeman and Michael A. Amundson. (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2004. xii, 187 pp. Cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-87081-763-9. Paper, $22.95, ISBN 0-87081-764-7.)
Why not judge a book by its cover?	1
A broad range of topics are deftly covered: Comics, the suburbs of Los Alamos, uranium mining, the neutron bomb, Nevada test sites, mushroom cloud kitsch, post–Cold War films, and proposed "monuments" (p. 149) to guard the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (located in Carlsbad, New Mexico). Most chapters are well written, enjoyable and quick reads; I have written a fair amount of marginalia; and I have learned a lot about some unfamiliar subjects— good seat-of-the-pants reasons to recommend this anthology to others. With a grain of salt.	2
The anthology's title grates like a teacher's fingernails drawn across a blackboard. For forty-five years, Stanley Kubrick's film, Dr. Strangelove (1964), has been the antinuclear political Left's only standard. Hundreds of articles and books have co-opted the film's title so that now it indexes not widespread "nuclearism," but the dire need for fresh and original thinking. The chapters, conversely, suggest that cultural responses to nuclear issues are complex and contradictory, and thus they strain against a constraining title.	. . .

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