Product Description

For the half-century duration of the Cold War, the fallout shelter was a curiously American preoccupation. Triggered in 1961 by a hawkish speech by John F. Kennedy, the fallout shelter controversy - "to dig or not to dig" as "Business Week" put it at the time - forced many Americans to grapple with deeply disturbing dilemmas that went to the very heart of their self-image about what it meant to be an American, an upstanding citizen, and a moral human being. Investigating the role of schools, television, government bureaucracies, civil defense, and literature, and rich in detail - including a detailed tour of the vast fallout shelter in Greenbriar, Virginia, built to harbour the entire US Congress in the event of nuclear armageddon - this book goes to the very heart of America's Cold War experience.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #849981 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.28 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 324 pages

From Library Journal
Although Rose (history, California State Univ., Chico; American Women and the Repeal of Prohibition) might have wished his popular history of the Cold War to work from below ground on up, his excavation of the great fear of the Fifties reveals a discourse overwhelmingly top-down. Government and civic elites propagandized for shelters built from theoretical funds that mostly were never appropriated; average citizens fretted that their neighbors were building bunkers to exclude them come Armageddon, yet apparently very few private spaces were ever erected. Rose demonstrates that the shelter was the leading if least visible icon of a civil defense debate that questioned whether nuclear wars were confinable, hence survivable, but also whether shelter was more practical or at least not incompatible with mass evacuation. Rose reconstructs Herman Kahn, the pro-limited nuclear war physicist/Dr. Strangelove model, as the most intriguing if possibly insane personage in his account but leaves much possibly fertile soil unturned. (What did history's most famous shelterists, the World War II British, think of their Yankee cousins' official mania only a few years later?) This book fails to live up to the originality promised by the subject but as a first-of-area undertaking should be acquired by academic libraries. Scott H. Silverman, Bryn Mawr Coll. Lib., PA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

"Negotiating Justice is one of those exceedingly rare books that examine how lawyers and clients collaborate to produce legality. These stories will be an inspiration to law students aspiring to work in the public interest and an affirmation for the thousands of lawyers who do so daily."
---Richard Abel, author of "English Lawyers between Market and State: The Politics of Professionalism"

ISBN: 0814775225 CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
"An interesting and amply illustrate documentary on cold war concerns."