An impressive survey that takes stock of unimaginable peril.
A world of dangers.
This comprehensive history meticulously details the process that keeps the nuclear balance in place and has prevented world annihilation. A Stanford University historian and author of Stalin and the Bomb (1994), Holloway has examined mountains of documents (the citation list runs more than 100 pages) beginning in the 1940s, before the first and only use of nuclear weapons, to the present day. While nuclear weapons have not been used in war since 1945, the threat of their deployment has shaped military history and international politics for decades. At the end of World War II, only one country, the U.S., possessed nuclear weapons; today, there are nine countries known to have them, with a global stockpile of about 13,000 weapons in various hands. That number is down from a peak of roughly 60,000 weapons, thanks to treaties. Holloway takes readers through brinksmanship (the Cuban missile crisis), resolution (President Ronald Reagan and Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev), global antinuclear movements, nonproliferation agreements, deterrence, strategic defense, and nuclear saber-rattling. From atomic weapons’ earliest days, it was clear that international control over their development, deployment, and use would be unlikely, if not impossible, because the policies and actions of individual countries would prevail in any situation. Leaders around the world saw and continue to see the atomic bomb not merely as a military weapon, but as an important source of political influence. Maintaining the delicate nuclear balance has so far been achieved by the “unacceptability of nuclear war”—the “nuclear taboo.” Holloway stresses that a nuclear war is unwinnable. “Nuclear-weapon states have made threats to use nuclear weapons, but is it not transgressive to advocate violating a taboo? Is that permissible as part of deterrence, which allows us to threaten terrible things in order not to have to carry them out?”
An impressive survey that takes stock of unimaginable peril.Pub Date: March 24, 2026
ISBN: 9780300229448
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Dec. 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.
A wide-ranging writer on his football fixation.
Is our biggest spectator sport “a practical means for understanding American life”? Klosterman thinks so, backing it up with funny, thought-provoking essays about TV coverage, ethical quandaries, and the rules themselves. Yet those who believe it’s a brutal relic of a less enlightened era need only wait, “because football is doomed.” Marshalling his customary blend of learned and low-culture references—Noam Chomsky, meet AC/DC—Klosterman offers an “expository obituary” of a game whose current “monocultural grip” will baffle future generations. He forecasts that economic and social forces—the NFL’s “cultivation of revenue,” changes in advertising, et al.—will end its cultural centrality. It’s hard to imagine a time when “football stops and no one cares,” but Klosterman cites an instructive precedent. Horse racing was broadly popular a century ago, when horses were more common in daily life. But that’s no longer true, and fandom has plummeted. With youth participation on a similar trajectory, Klosterman foresees a time when fewer people have a personal connection to football, rendering it a “niche” pursuit. Until then, the sport gives us much to consider, with Klosterman as our well-informed guide. Basketball is more “elegant,” but “football is the best television product ever,” its breaks between plays—“the intensity and the nothingness,” à la Sartre—provide thrills and space for reflection or conversation. For its part, the increasing “intellectual density” of the game, particularly for quarterbacks, mirrors a broader culture marked by an “ongoing escalation of corporate and technological control.” Klosterman also has compelling, counterintuitive takes on football gambling, GOAT debates, and how one major college football coach reminds him of “Laura Ingalls Wilder’s much‑loved Little House novels.” A beloved sport’s eventual death spiral has seldom been so entertaining.
A smart, rewarding consideration of football’s popularity—and eventual downfall.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2026
ISBN: 9780593490648
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2025
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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