| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Atomic Bomb Cinema: The Apocalyptic Imagination on Film. By Jerome F. Shapiro. (New York: Routledge, 2002. x, 386 pp. Cloth, $85.00, ISBN 0-415-93659-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-415-93660-8.)

In an age of new anxiety and the fear of catastrophic terrorism with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and new instructions from the federal government on civil defense, a timely new book, Jerome F. Shapiro's Atomic Bomb Cinema, offers a rich historical analysis of the cultural consequences of apocalyptic anxiety in film. The common interpretation of atomic bomb cinema (and other related cultural artifacts of nuclear weapons and energy) is framed by an overarching metaphor often inarticulately referred to as "nuclearism." This idea looks at atomic-age cinema as a modern teleology in which science and technology combine with a pathological self-destructive trait among human beings, and the "bomb" becomes the perfect cultural artifact unambiguously to demonstrate the divide between good and evil.

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