(2 of 3)
1 DARK SUN: THE MAKING OF THE HYDROGEN BOMB by Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster) looks clearly and steadily at what is, thus far, the most perilous venture in human history. The view is not in the least reassuring. The best that can be said is that in a struggle between our scientists on one side and our civilian and military politicians on the other--and, of course, between two such unstable aggregations on either side of the Iron Curtain--we blundered to a fortunate standoff. There were relatively sane and reasonable people in the several camps. But no reader of Rhodes' careful book can doubt that the ideologues--notably the belligerent Strategic Air Command head Curtis LeMay and the truly monstrous "father of the H-bomb," physicist Edward Teller--came close to making the earth uninhabitable for anything but cockroaches.
2 LANDSCAPE AND MEMORY by Simon Schama (Knopf). Once upon a time, when early man roamed the African savannas, landscape was where we lived. As Columbia University historian Schama relates in his long, richly detailed and fascinating study, our ways of thinking about ourselves and our world, and about national character and destiny, are deeply influenced by landscape. His book bears its scholarship gracefully, as when he traces the actuality of rivers--the flooding and enriching Nile as the center of our thoughts of riverness--to the symbolic rivers embodied in Bernini's designs for the splashing, tumbling fountains of Rome. Europe's towering Alps were known to harbor dragons, the author notes, and the deep forests to the north kept alive the mythical roots that became the bloody Germanic lore of Nazism. The book is a refreshing scenic turnoff from society's hell-bent journey toward clear-cutting our forests and drilling for oil in the Alaskan wilderness.
3 A CIVIL ACTION by Jonathan Harr (Random House). This true story of a gutsy lawyer who takes on a couple of corporate polluters on behalf of the penniless families of leukemia victims and extracts $8 million from one of the firms should be an inspiring proof that the system works. It's not, and the system doesn't. That's the glum message of reporter Harr's well-researched account. Jan Schlichtmann, the flamboyant Boston attorney who took the case against W.R. Grace and Beatrice Foods despite warnings that his law firm was too small to handle the enormous trial costs, ended up broke and unable to get his repossessed Porsche out of hock. This although he was virtuous and partly victorious (Beatrice was let off, despite later epa reports supporting the plaintiffs). The eight families of the Woburn, Massachusetts, leukemia victims got only $455,000 each, not much to cover the costs of lifelong illness. The important result was yet another warning to would-be Robin Hoods: Don't even think of fighting corporate America.