David Holloway. Nuclear Weapons. An International History.

     When David Holloway's "Stalin and the Bomb" appeared in early 90s, it was nothing but revolutionary. Despite limited information at the time, from the studies of the Soviet war plans, he basically concluded that the post-war occupation of Eastern Europe and communization of its politics was, to a large extent, a realpolitik answer to the US nuclear dominance rather than ideological construct. Soviet leaders simply wanted to extend strategic depth to the degree when any nuclear attack on the USSR would mean the end of the European civilization, the price Truman and Eisenhower were not willing to pay. Stalin and the Bomb was mostly positively reviewed though there were some neocons criticizing him for his portrayal of Soviet leaders as rational political actors. 

     Current US media and academic orthodoxy requiring depiction of the Russians as bumbling idiots or cartoon villains and the Americans as knights in shining armor did not spare a researcher even with the stature of Holloway. Any realistic description of Israeli policies is forsworn. Every chapter must end with a moral lesson showing the inherent superiority of the West. 

        Consequently, US and UK policy debates and actions showing contemporary contradictions and missteps are almost absent from his 600 pp. book. Israel, whose nuclear policy was strenuously opposed by all US administrations before Nixon, is given only three short pages. Other nuclear states fare better but only slightly. China, for instance, is discussed only in the context of worsening Sino-Soviet relations with perfunctory place given to the US concerns about Chinese (and others) nuclear weapons.

    In fact, during the Cold War, there were a lot of similarities between US and USSR. Both great powers had coincident interests during the Suez crisis in 1956. They, and two other European nuclear powers, were sharply opposed to West Germany acquiring nuclear weapons. Both detested idea of a separate NATO nuclear deterrent. After some vacillations, US policy makers basically accepted Soviet view on the need to keep nuclear weapons in a separate category from all others. Their views on China, India and Pakistan's nuclear programs were more nuanced but mostly compatible. 

         Hysterical anti-Russian bias, now universal in Western media (an old example), required Holloway to turn to the sources, such as the memoirs of Soviet defectors and dissidents who had likely to adapt to the Western publishing milieu (or their handlers) and must be treated with caution. Out of five endorsements on the cover of his book, two belong to Ukrainian nationalists (attempts of post-Soviet Ukraine to acquire nuclear weapons is a big story in itself). Saying all that, Holloway is incomparable to other US political scientists in his observational probity, technical competence, and when prevailing ideology and unimpeachable cult of Reagan and Thatcher (and Dulles, though nobody remembers him now) does not cloud his judgement, his book provides a broad prospective of nuclear issues. 

Michael Grunwald. We are eating the Earth.

 Book of more constructive proposals than Clapp's "The Waste War" and, consequently less readable. The thrust of a book is to turn attention of environmentalist community to the destructive effects of modern agriculture. Agriculture produces more greenhouse gases than aviation and marine freight combined, or so he says. Furthermore, agriculture makes enormous amounts of organic wastes, polluting water by runways, destroys the landscapes and influences quality of life in a myriad other ways. Grunwald uncovers fake ways to reduce greenhouse emissions on paper, such as Scandinavians burning "biomass" considered emissions neutral but in reality using wood pellets as fuel -- dirty, uneconomical process contributing to destruction of the environment in poorer countries. But his suggestions for mitigating agriculture's footprint other than employing the most productive methods in the poorer countries to mechanically reduce area used for cultivation and the promotion of swamps/wasteland are bordering on fantastic. These are drastic reductions in beef consumption -- in fact, a large fraction of world cows do not go into meat in India -- and synthetic meats. 

Des Fitzgerald. Living city: why cities don't need to be green.

    Ireland as is Switzerland is a veritable preserve of the views, which are considered antediluvian by the standards of developed world. For instance, in the early 1900, in Europe there was a vogue to rank "races" according to intelligence, etc. Of course, Brits and Germans were on top, French and Italians -- in the middle, but the Irish and Finns -- Europeans which were "unable" to create their nation-states at the very bottom, Jews were considered incapable of education, Japanese were inherently lazy, and so on. 

    Currently, such bullshit can still be published in Ireland, or in Switzerland as "science", only instead of Irish and Finns, they are being replaced by the Russians. Similarly, Fitzgerald considers the main criteria of quality of the cities the approval of some self-styled "philosophers" and snobbish architects for the very wealthy. Livability of the city, for instance, planning for convenience of commuting to work, existence of public parks or optimization of infrastructure, he variably, and sometimes anachronistically calls "fascist": P. C. L'Enfant, the architect of Washington, or Baron Hausmann, or "communist". I would not call his outlook "reactionary", just bizarre. 

Karen G. Lloyd. Intraterrestrials: discovering the strangest life on Earth.

     Karen Lloyd wrote a brilliant book about the microbial life forms on Earth, so strange that no science fiction author could seemingly invent anything like that. The book is hard reading. This is an example: "Indeed, we find that at increasing depths in marine sediments, microbes make enzymes with a higher specificity that are available in the subsurface, suggesting that they are specially adapted for this environment". Or "the researchers also found genes suggesting that they might have passed hydrogen back and forth with an endosymbiont (maybe a proto-mitochondria), as well as external structures that would help them hang on to their Alphaproteobacterial friend". But overall, the book is a wonder. 

Alexander Clapp. The waste wars: wild afterlife of your trash.

 Clapp is an alarmist. His book enumerates many problems with disposal of the "industrial" wastes, most prominently of commercial ships. He lists many disasters following the disassembling of ships and the damage of the procedure to the environment. This part of his narrative is exciting and helpful for understanding of the modern environmental challenges. 

    Yet, he does not propose any solutions to these problems. In most of the book, the positives from the ships' dismantling are glided over. First, recycling of steel, and second, the reuse of the amenities of the passenger ships -- he mentions the cabin furniture, microwaves, etc. after their cleaning -- saves enormous energy and materials. In particular, currently the demand for coal for coking and the iron ore has been significantly subdued and enormous quantities of new steel is produced by (relatively) efficient electric smelters. 

    Many of the problems he lucidly describes: horrible conditions inside the ships' hulks, leakage of toxic liquids before and during dismantling and using the poor countries like Pakistan and Bangladesh as a garbage disposals for the rich countries -- can be addressed within either technological advancements or enlightened social policy. Not all of the former require a particularly high technology though a hulk-plying robots would help. For instance, chemists could develop gas mixtures, something like a hot mixture of carbon dioxide with hydrogen in non-explosive concentrations, which can flush out the residuals of oils and other petroleum substances before the dismantling crews in hazmat suites are left in. Similarly, there could be measures for protecting the workers if only rich countries become moderately interested in this. In these times, in the US everything which smacks of non-military international aid is taboo; and the EU hastily prepares to war with Russia.