Book reviews: nukes, noise, nature… and hot dogs

This five-books-then-review idea seems to be working pretty well. Pressure’s off and I’ve a little more time to gather my thoughts. Will I still write too much? Probably. Will you read all of it? I’ve no idea.

But join me, won’t you? For a coffee break-sized meditation on books that, for some reason, seemed to concern mass destruction and mass production, along with some nice tunes.

Command and Control by Eric Schlosser.
My rating: five stars.

I read Schlosser’s breakthrough book, Fast Food Nation, in a flat in London when it came out and it mortified me into giving a lot of fast food a swerve by dint of its incredible readability and seemingly endless collection of fact-checked tales of horror. It really was the sort of book where if you believed the chapter you’d just read was going to be the worst thing you’d ever encountered then just wait until you get a dose of what’s coming up.

Command and Control follows a similarly expertly-researched path, except instead of being about the transmission of lips and anuses into foodstuffs it’s about nuclear fucking weapons, albeit nuclear fucking weapons handled with the same level of care present in disenchanted fast food worker nightshifts.

(Honestly, it’s incredible that the world hasn’t exploded.)

Schlosser focuses on a particular US accident in exhaustive detail, and uses it as a springboard to describe the creation of the atomic bomb, the development of the Cold War and the fiction of the bomber gap (and then the missile gap) that fuelled the nuclear arms race and the embrace of mutually assured destruction. Broken arrows, contaminated soil, radiation death and the flexing of military muscle to develop a stockpile so vast that use of even a fraction of it would’ve been overkill in the same way that using one of those military-grade reformatting programs that wipes and rewrites drives 200 times would be overkill for your grandma’s old computer.

(I don’t know: maybe your grandma’s got weird browsing habits better left obscured.)

The accident the book hinges around, and one that’s illustrative of breakdowns in process almost the whole way through is, of course, the 1980 Damascus Titan missile explosion. Involving a Titan II with a nine megaton warhead – the most powerful weapon in the US nuclear arsenal – the explosion was caused by a fucking socket dropping off a wrench (the wrong one, because the guy involved didn’t want to go back up and get the correct one as it was a pain in the arse) and falling down into the silo. Which normally wouldn’t be a problem except this time it bounced into the rocket, knocked a hole in it and started a leak of highly volatile liquid fuel.

Which is bad because if it mixes with oxidiser, which the rocket also carries, shit tends to blow up. How badly?

Yep. This is an incident that, had things gone differently, could’ve rendered an enormous chunk of the US glow-in-the-dark for a couple of thousand years. But, despite everything, some safety elements worked. The book unpicks the development and implementation of these element – successful in a case where literally everything else went wrong – and provokes a profound realisation in the reader that it is literally because of something as simple as a switch that we’re still around today.

This is a well-researched book of horrors that deserves your time. It’s informative while being as engrossing as the dumbest big-screen blockbuster.

(Honestly, we are a stupid, stupid species.)

Raw Dog: The Naked Truth About Hot Dogs by Jamie Loftus.
My rating: four stars.

I’ve previously written about how much I’ve enjoyed the work of Jamie Loftus, and this review will prove another instalment in the series.

A comedian and writer, I first came across Loftus as a guest on the Behind the Bastards podcast, before delving into her excellent Lolita and Ghost Church podcasts. Both those podcasts tackled fairly intense topics – Nabokov’s book and its long shadow and spiritualism, respectively – while weaving in stories from the writer’s life. The same approach is taken here, except the issue at hand is hot dogs, and you’d better believe that Jamie Loftus is serious about those things.

What results is a combination of hot dog history, a long road trip throughout the US to taste as many local variations as possible (before full organ collapse ensues), meditations on the state of the country during and after COVID, reminiscences of terrible motels, and the precise capture of a relationship that fails in the middle of a book advance-funded snack-eating excursion.

That is, it’s personal. While Loftus specifically calls out parasocial engagement in the opening parts of the book, it’s hard not to feel like she’s not your buddy, especially if you’re listening to her narration of the work. The tone is light, smart, and ruthlessly observational, and I’ve got to say that as much as I laughed, I also found a lot more moments of quiet contemplation (or anger, if we’re talking about the how-they’re-made section) than I’d expected. True, it probably isn’t quite as high on the angst-o-meter as, well, NUCLEAR DESTRUCTION (see previous and next title for further detail) but I had more feelings than I figured I would consuming a book about consuming a food made of mystery meat.

(During the creation of this book, Loftus created a one person show about her imaginary marriage to Joey Chestnut, noted hotdog eating champion, and you can watch it here.)

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin.
My rating: five stars.

The big dawg. Without receiving a copy of this work, Christopher Nolan would never have been spurred into making his three-hour biopic, and we would never have had that whole Barbenheimer thing.

To be fair, I can see why Nolan glommed onto this book. I’m pretty sure popcorn-eating levels of readability aren’t generally a hallmark of titles that win Pulitzer Prizes, but from the outset, Bird and Sherwin’s work engrosses. It’s an exceptionally detailed portrait of an exceedingly fucking strange dude. But it opens, as Nolan’s film does, with Oppenheimer forced to explain his relationship to Communism. Is it a witch hunt? Sure. Has he brought it on himself? Let’s see.

“They paid more to tap my phone than they paid me to run the Los Alamos Project.”

J. Robert Oppenheimer

That sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop remains until we get the whole story of Oppenheimer’s run-ins with a variety of jobsworth pricks and fiefdom-cultivating wonks. Before we get to that, though, we’re given the story of a remarkable, brilliant and difficult polymath whose abilities as a physicist (and as anything else, it would seem, including hardcore horse riding in New Mexico even though he was build like a skinnier version of Ichabod Crane) led him to steer the Manhattan Project and become one of the most famous men in the world.

From birth to scientific success, to political downfall and ultimate death, the authors leave no area uninvestigated. There’s an incredible amount of detail on the development of quantum physics, of the military machinations that led to the birth of the bomb, and of course on Oppenheimer’s thorny political history, The man and his milieu is effectively created, and difficult areas of science are conveyed in a manner that leaves the reader in no doubt of the difficulty of the endeavour, without making them feel like an untutored dumbass. It’s a fine portrait, and one that I urge you to read if you’ve any interest.

Naturally, I took the opportunity to watch Nolan’s Oppenheimer after completing Bird and Sherwin’s tome. It was very helpful in unpicking the film, given that so many physicists pass across the screen with a minimum of introduction outside very key people (I think Feynman was discernible solely by his bongos?) and I felt film communicated the thrust of the book very well.

(With the cast involved in the thing, it’s difficult to imagine it ever being a dud. Add those practical effects to the mix and the set/costume period-appropriate eye candy and I was hooked.)

You should probably have figured that my atomic itch wasn’t scratched by the time I completed this book: I’m now in the throes of reading the 25th anniversary edition of Richard Rhodes’ excessively detailed The Making of the Atomic Bomb y’know, for fun.

Unstrung: Rants and Stories of a Noise Guitarist by Marc Ribot.
My rating: three stars.

I figure people either come to Marc Ribot one of two ways. It’s either through his fearless experimentalism, his solo albums of gnarly originals and his role as go-to guitarist for downtown NY jazz-tinged weirdoes (hello, John Zorn).

Or it’s through the time he’s spent as Tom Waits’ guitarist of choice.

Ah who’m I kidding? It’s almost always through Waits. Because fuck me, there’s this:

Or this. Or this. Or *throws rock, hits tune*. You know.

In terms of guitarists whose ability constantly leaves me in awe and wondering why I bother continuing to play the fucking thing, Marc is up there. He’s someone who is immediately identifiable by his tone and phrasing, and he’s interesting, musically and, from interviews I’d read, personally. Unstrung is a basically a deep dive into Ribot’s brain, and as such I guess the audiobook provides the best way to do so: there’s nothing better than hearing these tales from the author’s laconic larynx.

The problem with the book – for me, at least – is that it really sings when Ribot discusses things close to his heart. The role of volume in band dynamics and the communion between audience and artist? Killer. His early guitar influences, and gigs supporting strippers while playing disco tunes? Rad. Stories about agitating and activism in the service of renters screwed over by the man? Absolutely great.

Poems, unfilmable film treatments and narratives about kids named Woody? Look, not so much.

The book definitely dragged for me in the last third or so. It could be that I play guitar so I’m wired to want Ribot to talk about those things, and I guess that’s a limiting interpretation of the man that I’ve brought to bear on this endeavour. But then, this is a random assemblage of stuff, so perhaps the lack of real focus (though it is divided into sections that vaguely let you know what you’re going to get) is the problem. It’s neither an effective collection of essays, nor a straightforward biography, and while the turn of phrase is great, I just felt there was something missing: a flubbed note that doesn’t add that element of intrigue.

The Hunter by Julia Leigh.
My rating: five stars.

I have had this on my to-read list for years now. It first came to my attention while I was doing a little research into the idea of Tasmanian Gothic: that is, the feeling that something just ain’t right about Tasmania’s southernmost state. Think Southern Gothic but transpose it downwards, closer to Antarctica and with a distinctly more fucked-up penal/products of dying empire colonisation bent and you’re probably getting there.

(Don’t forget the sublime, though: the place is seriously overqualified for totemic, brain-fracturing scenery. I’ve loved it since I first visited, and I do get the Gothic twinges from the place, even though certain Big Name Writers aren’t too hot on the term and find it limiting, a way of relegating the state to the role of misshapen relative locked in a basket.)

Anyway, Leigh’s text drew my attention, and eventually I picked up a copy, even though it’s taken too long to get to it. What results is a slim, exceptionally well considered work that’s essentially a mystery. We follow a man – we’re given a name but it’s unreliable, so he’s just referred to as M for most of the book – who visits Tasmania in search of the thylacine, the extinct Tasmanian tiger that came to Australia some 3500 years ago and lasted long enough for us humans to hunt the poor fuckers to death in the 1930s.

Why he’s hunting the supposedly extinct creature is unclear: he’s here on a job, and he doesn’t let on to the locals what his goal is. His employer remains obscured, a kind of environmental technology firm with thoughts towards wartime application of animal technology, perhaps? All we know is that M is sent on these trips, and he complies with efficiency.

His base of operations for this trip – the house of Lucy, mourning her dead husband and spending her days in bed while children Sass and Bike keep the house going – throws a spanner in the works, as does the enmity of locals who believe M’s university researcher cover story a little too fulsomely.

The Hunter reads a little like Gareth Liddiard’s songs sound: strange goings-on abound, though ones linked in a vaguely ex-militaristic way. Hard men examine their faults pitilessly during gouts of bad weather, but with a turn of phrase polished by silent, distant-stare rumination. What results is something that gets at the split between beast and man, and how wilderness can diminish that distance.

I really enjoyed this claustrophobic little book, and it won’t be the last Leigh I read. I’m going to tee up the film adaptation tomorrow night, I think: I’m going in with no expectations, but given the cast I should be assured of a reasonably good time, at least.

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