Some people really do know how to make a difference in their culture. And one of them is Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation, 2001; Reefer Madness, 2003).

The September 30th issue of The New Yorker has an in-depth review by Louis Menaud of Schlosser's newest book, Command and Control. Here's a quote from that review:

"…an excellent journalistic investigation of the efforts since the first atomic bomb was exploded, outside Alamogordo, New Mexico, on July 16, 1945, to put some kind of harness on nuclear weaponry. By a miracle of information management, Schlosser has synthesized a huge archive of material, including government reports, scientific papers, and a substantial historical and polemical literature on nukes, and transformed it into a crisp narrative covering more than fifty years of scientific and political change. And he has interwoven that narrative with a hair-raising, minute-by-minute account of an accident at a Titan II missile silo in Arkansas, in 1980, which he renders in the manner of a techno-thriller…

…Command and Control is how non-fiction should be written."

And once again for Schlosser, written about something we all should know.

Kudos to Eric Schlosser for the new book, and kudos to Louis Menaud for a wonderfully written, in-depth review. I highly recommend both.