The Doomsday Machine by
Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction, Finalist for The California Book Award in Nonfiction, The San Francisco Chronicle's Best of the Year List, Foreign Affairs Best Books of the Year In These Times, "Best Books of the Year", Huffington Post's Ten Excellent December Books List, LitHub's "Five Books Making News This Week". From the legendary whistle-blower who revealed the Pentagon Papers, an eyewitness exposé of the dangers of America's Top Secret, seventy-year-long nuclear policy that continues to this day. Here, for the first time, former high-level defense analyst Daniel Ellsberg reveals his shocking firsthand account of America's nuclear program in the 1960s. From the remotest air bases in the Pacific Command, where he discovered that the authority to initiate use of nuclear weapons was widely delegated, to the secret plans for general nuclear war under Eisenhower, which, if executed, would cause the near-extinction of humanity, Ellsberg shows that the legacy of this most dangerous arms buildup in the history of civilization--and its proposed renewal under the Trump administration--threatens our very survival. No other insider with high-level access has written so candidly of the nuclear strategy of the late Eisenhower and early Kennedy years, and nothing has fundamentally changed since that era.Framed as a memoir--a chronicle of madness in which Ellsberg acknowledges participating--this gripping exposé reads like a thriller and offers feasible steps we can take to dismantle the existing "doomsday machine" and avoid nuclear catastrophe, returning Ellsberg to his role as whistle-blower. The Doomsday Machine is thus a real-life Dr. Strangelove story and an ultimately hopeful--and powerfully important--book about not just our country, but the future of the world.
~ Shigeru Nanbara 1889-1974 translated by Richard H Minear
War and Conscience in Japan by
One of Japan's most important intellectuals, Nambara Shigeru defended Tokyo Imperial University against its rightist critics and opposed Japan's war. His poetic diary (1936-1945), published only after the war, documents his profound disaffection. In 1945 Nambara became president of Tokyo University and was an eloquent and ardent spokesman for academic freedom. Among his most impressive speeches are two memorials to fallen student-soldiers, which directly confront Nambara's wartime dilemma: what and how to advise students called up to fight a war he did not believe in. In this first English-language collection of his key work, historian and translator Richard H. Minear introduces Nambara's career and thinking before presenting translations of the most important of Nambara's essays, poems, and speeches. A courageous but lonely voice of conscience, Nambara is one of the few mid-century Japanese to whom we can turn for inspiration during that dark period in world history.
The Scars of War by
Takeyama Michio, the author of Harp of Burma, was thirty-seven in 1941, the year of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Husband, father of children born during the war, and teacher at Japan's elite school of higher education in Tokyo, he experienced the war on its home front. His essays provide us with a personal record of the bombing of Tokyo, the shortage of food, the inability to get accurate information about the war, the frictions between civilians and military and between his elite students and other civilians, the mobilization of students into factory jobs and the military, and the relocation of civilians out of the Tokyo area. This intimate account of the "scars of war," including personal anecdotes from Takeyama's students and family, is one of very few histories from this unique vantage point. Takeyama's writings educate readers about how the war affected ordinary Japanese and convey his thoughts about Japan's ally Germany, the Tokyo War Crimes Trial, and the immediate postwar years. Beautifully translated by Richard H. Minear, these honest and moving essays are a fresh look at the history of Japan during the Asia-Pacific War.
