[Music] is America doomed Kurt Anderson will be here to discuss his new book Evil Geniuses the unmaking of America a recent history what's the story behind John her's Monumental book Hiroshima Leslie mm Bloom will be here to talk about Fallout the hirosima coverup and the reporter who revealed it to the World Plus we'll talk about what we and the Water World are reading this is the book review podcast from The New York Times it's August 28th I'm Pamela [Music] Paul CTT Anderson joins us now he has a new book out it's called Evil Geniuses the unmaking of America a recent history cartt thanks for being here oh thanks for having me all right so your previous book to this was fantasy land and I I feel like there's a connection so where did leave off in that book and pick up in your new book there's definitely a connection and and they really amount to kind of a two volume history of the screwing up of America of the last half century fasy land was about how this chronic condition in America of of of a weakness for the irrational and magical thinking and entertaining lies turned into this acute illness after having been a centuries long chronic illness the last 50 years and thus the president of the United States as the poster boy for that and this is a different story this is not a spontaneous or organic problem that I'm talking about here it's it's about the paradigm shift and hijacking of our political economy that happened starting 50 years ago by who what the people I call Evil Geniuses it's this very rational very specific very strategic long war that had the effect in a hundred different ways of making the majority of Americans worse off so if Fantasy Land talked about America's propensity to believe in nonsensical illogical things it sounds like Evil Geniuses is kind of why the efforts that were made on the part of Institutions and individuals that have led to that kind of thinking no actually not that led to that kind of thinking that in it's a wholly different thing what what I have having been a neoliberal clintonian Centrist Democrat of my adult life part of this book it's aaula for simply being oblivious to what the economic right was doing so these Evil Geniuses are people of the economic rights you know the CES are the most obvious buzzword way of saying that and how they manipulated and used and changed through all of these different means the way we thought society and the economy should be since the New Deal they used the fantasies and Del Illusions and magical thinking and all that of their political allies on the right to enable their real project which is to make Americans think that government has no role in in anything involving the free market when you were working on fantasy land did you know that you were going to be writing this second kind of companion book I really didn't know that and it was late in the game of working on fantasy land where I realized wait I am kind of telling half the story here there there is this other story that isn't about look at wacky America we've always been wacky for 400 years and believed all kinds of nonsense but I realized that there was this other story about how the economy changed and how politics changed and and what technology is doing that is the other half and it really came when I was out talking about fantasy land with people readers whatever I remember early on a woman at a reading stood up and said well what about climate change yes it's a matter of nonsensical disregarding science and the facts but it's it's all about people like the coch brothers Shifting the way people thought and denying science and I said yeah it's that but it wouldn't have happened to the extent it has in the United States without this underlying iffy grip on empirical reality but I I realized that it was both of those things you know people all over the world have iffy grips on on empirical reality but they don't have this massive politicized denial of climate change for instance it's the two working in concert in so many ways that has led us where we are okay I have two Tim related questions the first about the writing of the book and the second about the time that you cover in the book and I'm getting very specific about the timing of the writing of the book because as you know things are moving so fast that the second you think that something is the big story something else becomes the big story and these are both kind of 2016 post 20106 books where do you do pick up in writing this book and and also when did you stop because you know it probably I'm assuming this was a pre- black lives matter but maybe postco book or am I getting that wrong first of all Fantasy Land I wrote and finished before Donald Trump was even nominated so it wasn't like oh look Donald Trump I'll reverse engineer how that happened over several hundred years with this I delivered it in early February but then bless randomhouse had the next several months to incorporate which is a significant incorporation because it reflects so much of what I'm talking about the pandemic and the hellacious horrific US Government Trump Administration response to the pandemic which illustrates most really of my major themes in this book so I the whole last chapter is about that and indeed the the black lives matter protest also is in here as well to the degree it relates to what I'm talking about this this is a book less about race than it is about economics and Technology but it's certainly all of a piece and I and I address both the pandemic thoroughly and it's also about culture in relation to economics so you've mentioned that this is about the past 50 years we're talking about something that you see as kind of beginning or shifting doing a a cultural U-turn in the 1970s what happened then well what happened culturally and this is a a subject that I was been thinking about for while independently and then over the last decade I realized wait there there are several interesting connecting points between the phenomena what happened I believe in reaction to the late 1960s which is to say the cultural 1960s all of this kind of glut of the new and the shock of the new in not only race and gender Norms but cultural norms and the kind of ultra individualism and find your own truth and make your own Bliss and all that and just the General constant cultural newness and change every couple of years I believe what happened and it's pretty clear to me what happened starting right after that in reaction in the early 70s was this plunge into Nostalgia this wholesale plunge into Nostalgia that didn't just last a few years to get over the crazy 60s it abided it kept going and kept going through the 70s and was part of what enabled the reaganite right to sell a majority of us this morning in America idea of like wouldn't it be nice if we're all like it was in the old days again and look Ronald Reagan kind of epitomizes the old days doesn't he and isn't he a nice guy so this this General like unprecedented and unprecedentedly long plunge into cultural Nostalgia pop cultural and otherwise enable this again I'm not enough of a of a conspiracist to suggest that the Evil Geniuses created it but they certainly used it really brilliantly and then the other part of my cultural story is that after that two decade long plunge into Nostalgia another even weirder and more unprecedented thing happened in this country and Beyond which is this kind of cultural stasis where there's just less cultural change than there was certainly in my lifetime but for more than a century that things kind of stayed the same and big radical cultural disruptions apart from the technological ones stop happening as much and and and I think that fits into what's going on here too because it it reinforces people's sense that big change just can't happen doesn't happen isn't going to happen so so I think that has reinforced the sense that what's the point of politics what's the point nothing's going to change I want to go back before we get to our current hellish moment to the 1970s because I'm interested in in the in in what happened during that decade usually when when I think about that period of nostalgia and I'm assuming the Nostalgia what the Nostalgia is for is kind of that that postwar you know up through maybe the assassination of Kennedy kind of period of of economic prosperity and all of those you know GI Bill and things like that I think of that as rooted in the 80s and I don't think of that as the 70s what what were the signs of that during that decade well it was happening even in the 60s during this decade of new new new avang gardism performers like the Grateful Dead and the band and Dylan and all the rest and the Beatles were their Edwardian getups were in their Cutting Edge cool way dabbling in the past in various kinds of nostalgia that but then starting as I track it from the appearance of the fake 50s Revival act shaana at Woodstock in August of 1969 but then with Happy Days in American Graffiti and I could go on and on and on and Bruce Springstein for that matter who was kind of a high-end Nostalgia act when he came along in the early 70s that's when it started and I spend a whole chapter going over the extent of this and people don't remember so this has been a hobby horse of mine for a while but I realized how it related to this political paradigm shift I'm talking about I came across in the research for Evil Geniuses this extraordinary piece in the New York Times by Robert Bruin who was then the head of the Yale drama school talking about this strange new plunge into nostalgia in all Realms of culture and theater and television and fashion and dance and what's that about and is it connected to conservatism I was happy that I had my and had written about my version of this before I came across but it was like finding the Rosetta Stone like it's not just me 40 years later saying this it's this guy in the center of the culture seeing it and remarking on its weirdness in 1975 all right I'm going to make a big time Jump because I want to talk about where we have ended up now and you cover a lot of territory in this book we don't have time to go into it all but you mentioned earlier the current fear and distrust of government and the cultural stasis in this country and you mentioned also the Koch brothers and those on the right who have enabled and encouraged that but one of the things you write about is that it sort of can all be blamed on them and that even on the side of the Democrats and liberals there's been a kind of complicity and Maya as part of that complicit pack of complacent liberals who never thought it would go where it was going one can over interpret or over determine the idea of historical Cycles but I think there is a long historical cycle here from the New Deal in 1930s to the 1970s ' 80s that was this 4050 year cycle where there was a consensus about what the government could do and how we were the government and we helped our ourselves and we scrutinized and restrained big business and all those things and all all the various ways that was done that shifted and many of us me included when I was a kid you know going to college in the 70s and then and I started thinking well you know liberalism is irreversible progress is irreversible was at least my notion of the time and I think that happened to a lot of us and okay if there's this conservative course correction that's going to happen here in late 70s and ' 80s okay fine we'll meet them halfway that kind of attitude because we're still in charge they haven't repealed the EPA they haven't ended Social Security or Medicare so this habitual compromise oh yeah sure we can compromise we can find common ground with the right here and felt free to do that because there was this kind of liberal hegemony in in politics and culture and every other way so like oh what's the harm what's the harm in the 70s and 80s and then that went on in my view way too long and became a kind of posture of cowering really and and the Democratic party and liberals in America really failed to have a distinct Vision that they put forward of being different than Republicans they became Liberal Republicans effectively and there was no longer an economic left as there had been certainly you know in Roosevelt's time and afterwards and and and it was institutionalized but then it was like no we all agree here we really don't disagree do we we affluent liberal and conservative Bourgeois and and that's the problem and that just went on too long and in my view thank goodness I and others in the last decade or two have begun to to wake up and see that this has not gone well because the system was changed in a way that only benefits as we all know and all heard many times the very top economically a lot of people look at Clinton as if not a turning point because it sounds like you're saying this is really a kind of Continuum and began long before that but an intensification of that politics of compromise with his views on welfare and on criminal justice and on issues that had sort of historically been the province of conservatives that he kind of not only compromised and embrace compromise but really advocated for those things and the story I tell in Evil Geniuses is that that preceded him by generation that was already happening in the 70s with the bill Bradley's and my friend Bob Cary and Paul SAS and Mike ducus and Gary Hart all of these new Democrats in the 70s and 80s who were already effectively taking over the Democratic party and again in many cases out of earnest Goodwill oh there's new ways of doing this we don't have to be stuck in the past let's figure out ways that are great that you know we can meet halfway we can have new Solutions so no it preceded Bill Clinton Bill Clinton was the first Democratic president of this new democrat Paradigm and so he gets the blame and ser some of the blame for all the good that Administration did as well but no that that's sort of my point in this book of both the right was beginning their Counterattack in this fullscale class war in the early 70s but so were the Liberals and the Democrats in the 70s and 80s way before Bill Clinton co-founded the Centrist Democratic Leadership Council and before he became president this was going on and he was simply the full realization of hey we don't really disagree that all solutions to social problems are market-based and we don't really disagree that big social programs are obsolete that had been brewing and and Bill Clinton you know just got there and was president and and made that even more the programmatic idea behind the Democratic party did Obama fit right into that well Obama did not markedly change from that Alas and I I'll bet he would C to that I think the fact that when he became president was continuing that and Staffing his his administration with people like Lawrence Summers and and the Bob reubenites and and and so forth these Wall Street Centric philic people who were his economic Brain Trust yeah he he stayed with it I mean he had other fish to fry obviously including a near depression that his administration had to stop from happening and his race and everything else so yeah I think on the stuff I'm talking about in in Evil Genius is this this economic paradigm shift that had happened you know in 1980 he did not do much shifting I mean he you know it was under his in his administration that Elizabeth Warren had to sort of fight against the Obama economic Brain Trust to get the financial Consumer Protection Agency created and so more power to him them her for that happening so the shift was happening and the shift has happened and and that's good and I think the fact that the Elizabeth Warren wing of the democratic party is now somewhat ascended along with the Bernie Sanders Wing along with the Yang candidacy I I think we are talking about things the future of automation fairness in the society all those things that really weren't on the table for several decades because Democrats didn't put them on the table because they didn't have a distinct point of view about how our political economy should be and used to be and was screwed up by the right and you have long established liberal credentials as one of the the co-founders of spy magazine you were one of the eyes casting a very dark satirical eye on the decade of greed in the 80s but you mentioned that that this because of kind of mayaula and that your politics have changed particularly in the last 10 years in what ways and and what sparked that I mean they had been changing at the turn of the century I would say I drove pretty slowly on that road to Damascus to my to my apostasy but there in 2006 I remember you know things were going great right the economy was rocking real estate was you know still fantastic it wasn't a bubble it didn't look like a bubble yet and I remember meeting these two airline pilots when I was home where I grew up in Omaha Nebraska and how just ruined they felt and how what like Chumps they felt having been screwed over by United Airlines and the promises that had been made them and the it was like whoa what what's going on here and and I that's really when I began the reading and research and began slowly changing my mind from clintonian Liberal Centrist whatever to no this is a real problem and was happening before our eyes it was a it was a conspiracy but unlike people imagine conspiracies done in plain sight in a thousand different ways and so that really began changing my mind and and you know you can't I can't look at all of the data and and graph after graph after graph of what happened around 1980 as the economy continued growing but you know median incomes flatlined productivity continued increasing but median in income Flatline and the various kinds of insecurity and decreased economic mobility and on and on and on all of which happened around that time and didn't just happen it's research I mean I had a hunch but then years of research filled it in and and kept astonishing me and you you compare the United States to the rest of the rich world where of course not of course but inequality did increase in the end of the 20th century but they because they have a different view of what government should do and what Society should be and fairness and the rest moderated that so it was a little bit more the inequality increased a little bit overall while ours was zooming up and becoming a kind of American exceptionalism of a bad kind where where this this country just went out of whack and wasn't doing better otherwise it wasn't as though we were growing so much better or we had such better productivity or anything else than these other rich countries we were just dividing up the pie unfairly and they kept dividing it fairly so I was I was getting to where I got somewhat slowly for the last uh I don't know 15 years really and then when I sat down after I'd finished fantasy land and 2016 and started doing this reading it was just like good God man what have we let happen to this country the distrust and the fear of government that you describe in your book goes back obviously to the to the found in of of our country I want to talk about though how that has accelerated and manifested itself in our current moment the last chapter of your book looking at America under pandemic and there was this there was a great video that the opinion side of the times put together I don't know if you saw it but it was of young people around the world looking at what was happening in America in the response to the Corona virus from the government and from the American people and responding at first in laughter and as this sort of I think it's just a three-minute video goes on you know they end up in horror and Tears In what ways has the pandemic Illustrated demonstrated your thesis here really it illustrates both my thesis in my last book about crazy conspiracy theory and denial of science so that was is part of it but it also unfortunately illustrates the argument in Evil Geniuses the New York Times in its story recently examining why did we handle this so much worse than other rich countries and and they summarize it by saying we because there is a tradition in America of prioritizing individualism over government restrictions and number two our political leaders meaning Donald Trump and and Republican Governors I guess departed from expert advice significantly well those two things really are just a summary of these two books which is to say yes there is a tradition in America for hundreds of years of individualism we are individualists good true great but it had not gotten crazily politicized weaponized put out of control until the last few decades as part of this political project because the more individualism which is to say government has no role in anything is privileged and put up as the ultimate necessary American idea the more business can do whatever the it once so that's how we got here I mean the those two things oh yes it's hard to make Americans behave sure but it didn't become so politicized as a thing like I will not wear a mask I will I will not stay inside all those things I will not take vaccines before this I will not allow gun regulation all those things have been used and whipped up very deliberately brilliantly by my Evil Geniuses so yeah I'm not denying that these things existed but we were able as a society to use our government institutions to protect ourselves successfully and as a collateral damage of the billionaires and big business CEOs and right-wing libertarian zealots and all the rest I'm not saying they wanted this to happen but what they wanted to happen what they made happen through their various means over the last 40 and 50 years was this by their version of libertarianism where if you don't want to do something by God that's your right as an American say you don't want to do it the hens are coming home or whatever that phrase is as a result it wasn't the intention I don't think to kill so far let's say 75,000 of our 150,000 dead from covid on purpose but it is a result of of what the right has done you've given me no way of ending on a happy note there's plenty of Happiness no there ways out it's hopeful all right well I will leave that to readers to discover in the the final chapters of your book the book again is called Evil Geniuses the unmaking of America a recent history by Kurt Anderson Kurt thanks so much for being here oh thank you it's my [Music] pleasure so here's a request for our listeners I get lots of feedback from you some complaints lots of kind words really appreciate it you can always reach me directly at books atny times.com I will write back but you can also if you feel moved to do so review us on any platform where you download the podcast whether that's iTunes or Stitcher or Google play or somewhere else please feel free to review us and of course email us at any time Leslie mm Bloom joins us now from losis California in Los Angeles to talk about her new book Fallout the hirosima coverup And the reporter who revealed it to the world Leslie thanks for being here thanks for having me this is a book I should say about Hiroshima by John hery I think most people are probably familiar with that book um we'll talk about it in more detail but your subtitle um refers to a coverup and I'm curious let's just start there what was the cover up well in in uh August of 1945 is you know your listeners all know the United States decimated hoshima with nearly 10,000 pound uranium bomb which was dubbed little boy and the government was almost ecstatically forthright in how they had this new experimental Mega weapon you know they always trotted out the the coverage of it in terms of TNT it was almost painted as a as a conventional Mega weapon you know this was the equivalent to 20,000 tons of TNT and what reporters quickly picked up on was that amidst all this outsized coverage you know with pictures of landscape Devastation and pictures of the mushroom clouds that the human toll was not really being properly if at all reported from under those mushroom clouds in Hiroshima and then 3 days later in Nagasaki and as it transpired the US was really doing quite an effective job of suppressing Japanese and Foreign Press in terms of reporting on the human tul out of fear for being seen as a former Secretary of War Henry Simpson put it seen as outdoing Hitler in atrocity you know the US had just won this unqualified military victory over the Axis powers and really wanted to have their moral Victory intact also you know the Pacific Theater was extraordinarily painfully fought for and you know having coverage of the ghastly human toll in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not going to help maintain that moral Victory and so the cover up really pertained to in particular to the radio iCal after effects of the bomb namely that the bomb was the weapon that went on killing long after detonation and was John her's book which was a first of course a uh an issue length article in the New Yorker was that a kind of turning point in terms of awareness of the human toll and the reality of what that bomb wrought on Hiroshima absolutely the reality of what happened on the ground there was seen as a huge scoop for many competitive reporters who were coming in early with occupation forces and a few people were able to get out initial alarming reports but after that the MacArthur occupation apparatus was able to organize quickly and they enacted a press code which completely suppressed the Japanese press they weren't even allowed to mention poetry much less a press report about radiation induced deaths again foreign reporters uh the occupation press Corp was brought to heal very quickly also hery didn't get in until eight or N9 months later and at that point the occupation press Corps was really you know completely suppressed and yet hery managed to get into hoshima do his reporting get out and really reveal the truth for the first time not only to American readers to but to the world right let's talk about hery and who he was what his background was he'd been writing novels right before I mean he'd been a reporter obviously as well but how did he get in there and and what Drew him to be the one to write about this well hery he's a super interesting guy and like many reporters of his era he was a literary reporter meaning that he he he mixed up between Nobles and also reporting and he was a celebrated War correspondent he'd been covering the war for Time Magazine since 1939 he'd won the fitzer for his 1944 War novel Bel for Adano he was also a commended war hero he had been covering a battle between the Japanese and American forces in the Solomon Islands and helped evacuate wounded Marines so he was an interesting candidate and probably a perfect candidate to get into occupi Japan because if you were seen as a troublemaker if you had been a reporter who had been butting heads with MacArthur's forces throughout the war you you were going to either not get in or you were going to be so hindered when you got in on the ground that you wouldn't be able to travel around the country Percy on the other hand had been a perfect wartime Ally reporter I mean his he had done many glowing profiles of military figures including General MacArthur which was was helpful in in her's bid to get into the country and so as I describ him in the book he was really a trojan horse over reporter because he's getting in under the the premise that he's probably going to be an innocuous Force but then he does manage to get to hoshima and get again get his reporting about what it was like to be on the receiving end of nuclear warfare get out of Japan write his report back in New York and I think occupation official who had let him in in the first place grew to regret their decision pretty quickly and did he go there with the backing of the New Yorker or did he sell the piece subsequently to them it was conceived with the New Yorker hery had actually left time Inc by the time he got the idea for the piece with his now editor William Shawn at the New Yorker and they both realized over lunch one day when they were talking about you know story ideas that they were really disturbed by the lack of reporting again on the human toll in Hiroshima and as hery later recounted he said he wanted to do a story about what happened not to buildings but what happened to human beings and William sha who's one of my favorite protagonists in the book was known as the Magazine's quote hunch man and throughout the war he had dispatched correspondents all over the globe he he didn't know exactly what the story would be he just knew that there would be a huge one and his his judgment ended up being uniring in this case all right let's talk about what he saw when he got there hery was a seasoned War correspondent again you know he had covered the war in various theaters since 1939 and he had seen everything from combat to concentration camps but when he got into Hiroshima he was astonished and don't forget he had to pass through Tokyo which had been you know nearly completely raised that Spring by firebombing and yet what he found on Hiroshima was just breathtaking he had seen decimation he had seen Rubble he had seen death but what terrified him was that this had all been rot by one single primitive bomb and he really became just completely alarmed for the future of humanity in in the atomic age so the bomb falls on August 6th 1945 when does he get there he was given clearance to come in in May of 1946 and then when he got on the ground in Tokyo he was given a couple of weeks to travel to Hiroshima prefecture and then come back and that might sound like it's a lot of time but there you know there's a it was an staggering task because you know you have to actually get down to hoshima from Tokyo you have to identify blast survivors who were back living in the ruins who were going to talk to you he hery did not speak Japanese he needed to find people to help him translate and also to help him make inroads within the the blast Survivor Community luckily he was able to do this and I can't even imagine what the psychological toll must have been on him so I have not read Hiroshima since I think 9th grade in High School when it was assigned and I don't know if it's still assigned with the same regularity it was just one of those things you had to read along with you know 1984 in The Diary of Anne Frank in terms of understanding that particular period in time I don't know if it's still assigned to that extent but the feeling the memory that I have of reading it a feeling was was a feeling of you know you're here this is happening right now and yet for us to hear about a reporter getting to the site months and months after after the fact I'm curious to hear like how did he recreate this it felt very here and now it felt like you know he arrived on the scene yeah well two things on that I mean first of all it was it one of the astonishing things about her's report is that it came out more than a year after hoshima had happened and hoshima was considered to be by editors reporters and and readers alike a quote Old story yet when people were reading it it it had the urgency of of a news report is it was as if it had happened the day before and hery knew that when he was writing this report that people would have a lot of incentive to ignore it or not read willfully not read it first of all because you know the material was was terrifying and and ghastly and you know secondly because it was going to confront a lot of Americans for the first time with the reality of what their experimental Mega weapon had done to a largely civilian population it's been estimated that 90% around 90% of those killed in hoshima were civilians so the way that he created that feeling he for for him he had to create something novelistic and unput downable the only way he was going to get people to be engrossed by it so he he created it in sort of a novel structure where he picked six protagonists who I mean everybody who he interviewed had equally you know horrifically compelling stories but these people who he picked had all their lives overlapped in real life and then they all overlapped um on on the day of August 6 1945 and in the days afterwards and so he was able to create this sort of cliff-hanging narrative among all of those testimonies and it is one of the most transporting works I have ever read and you know I even when I glance at the pages now and obviously I've been very immersed in this work for a few years I mean it just you're instantly back again and you know her idea was that he wanted his readers to experience the event with these six protagonists because he felt if he could create a sense of empathy it would dehumanize the Japanese to Americans and he really truly felt that the only chance that Humanity had to survive in the atomic age again was if humans started to see the humanity in one another again what was the public and critical reception at the time of publication I mean was this immediately seen as this kind of really important Monumental work yes absolutely Percy later said that the immediate response was explosive which isn't a word that I would use yeah a little unfortunate choice of words yeah but that's but the sentiment was accurate and I have to say look it wasn't a foregone conclusion that the public was going to be receptive to this I mean they were the American public was incredibly angry about Pearl Harbor and horrified by revelations about you know Japanese atrocities and Nan King and Manila and throughout China and you know they had again had horrifically bloody time with this adversary in the Pacific even just from a little bit of a blowback that I've been getting 75 years later in telling the story you know that you know the Japanese deserved it you know Harry Truman said in his speech announcing the bomb you know the Japanese have been repaid manyfold so given that mindset the reaction to hercus hoshima was astonishing survey at the time said that it was a work that had been really promoted the common good and that it had opened up people's eyes to not just what it happened specifically in Hiroshima but but the danger that human Civilization now faced the the story which is some 31,000 Words which as you know is an incredibly long story for a news magazine was syndicated in its entirety in newspapers around the world it was read in its entirety in four consecutive nights on ABC and then the BBC it was covered on more than 500 radio stations in the us alone it was more or less immediately made into a book and you know editions of it were released I think 22 editions or something like that within the first year which is again as you know is a pretty astonishing development the influence was outsized and total and you know many many people for the first time really were understanding the the weapons that had been developed in secret and detonated in their names your first book about a book was also a book about a book about war um you know he previously wrote about how many ways The Sun Also Rises did you finish that and think I like doing this I'm GNA find another book about war and I'm going to do I mean they're very different books but I'm going to do this again from this angle yeah I'm such a cliche of myself um you know I have to say I I kind of wish that hadn't shaken out that way because it's you know it's not like I really want to make an extensive career out of documenting the evolution of these these great works but you know in this case what I really wanted to do with Fallout is I I knew before I even had this topic that I wanted to do a big historical non non-fiction narrative on a historical Newsroom story because I've been personally very upset as an understatement about the unprecedented assaults on our Free Press in this country over the last four years and I really needed to find a historical Newsroom narrative that drove home the extremity of the importance of investigative reporting holding the powerful to account and giving a voice to those who can't speak for themselves and I I looked at many different narratives most of them in the World War II period because I just have an affinity academically and for for that period and her's story found me as much as I found it and it was the purest example of of crucial investigative reporting as I could as I could find and it you know to this day it stands it's it's regularly cited uh as the most influential piece of written investigative journalism ever created well the crisis around the first amendment and news and investigative reporting and news deserts and and and freedom of speech and all of that obviously is one that's close to my heart as a journalist but there are so many crises right now between climate and the pandemic and the economy I'm interested to know if working on this book created a greater sense of urgency around another crisis that sort of waxes and wains in popular imagination or awareness which is nuclear war I mean did you end this thinking oh actually we should be more scared about this more aware of this than we are absolutely and I don't you know the the Public's bandwidth right now to stare down another existential crisis is probably pretty thin and in in some some respects it's it's almost we in a similar environment to 1945 and 1946 where you know the American public was just exhausted by what I call atrocity fatigue except this is different we're exhausted for different reasons but the fact is is that you know when the pandemic has been quelled uh we are staring down you know a terrific existential threat with uh with nuclear uh the nuclear landscape and the bulletin for the atomic scientists uh has designated our current landscape as being the most dangerous ever and that includes even more dangerous than 1953 the depths of the Cold War when thermonuclear weapons were first detonated this country is about to commit to a $1.7 trillion program in new nuclear arms development we are I believe that we're only in One International treaty now of of Arms Control it's an extremely alarming environment and you know even though this was I entered into this project really as a defense of onea of of First Amendment and reminding readers of how you know deadly important our Free Press is to up upholding our democracy helping to uphold our democracy I will never now not be or attempt to be an asset to Advocates who are trying to raise awareness around nuclear issues because it is going to be something that is going to We Can't be surprised by it when we come out of our current crisis we have to be prepared to Grapple with it and it also needs to be an election issue going into this fall well a fine example again to go to your original intent on highlighting the importance of the First Amendment and investigative reporting the book again is called Fallout the Hiroshima coverup and the reporter who revealed it to the World by Leslie mm Bloom Leslie thanks again for being here thank you so much for having me on [Music] Alexander alter joins us now with some news from the publishing World hey Alexander hey Pamela how's this week been and what's going on so there is really good news and then kind of bad news and they're closely related which is pretty interesting there's been a huge spike in demand for print books from readers and sales are up despite as we've talked about the challenges of the shutdown and the pandemic but at the same time print capacity has been a real challenge for Publishers and now they're facing a really crowded fall season a lot of the books that were postponed in the spring and early summer were pushed back to fall and those books are colliding with long planned big releases and Publishers are just having a hard time getting enough copies printed and books that have sold so far beyond anyone's expectations books like the Mary Trump the Stephanie Meyer which was sort of a surprise not not a surprise hit but it was announced and then quickly released John Bolton Suzanne Collins The Hunger Games author all those books have sold more than a million copies and so now you're seeing Publishers having to take these books that they've already moved back to the fall and push them further out some of them are going into next year and for a business that really is carefully calibrated for release dates Publishers are always thinking about when they can get media attention and they don't want all the big books to come out the same week because it detracts from the attention they can get they're really having to scramble so on the one hand great news that readers are buying so many books and print sales are up but real challenges on the supply chain side you and I are talking here on August 27th there were about 15 major books that came out on the 25th of August earlier this week that's unusual like this used to be kind of The Dead Zone and I remember we were looking at the books to sort of watch for in September which is a story we put up each month for upcoming releases and we just could not cut it down there are just so many big big books coming out you have to wonder how are they all going to get attention there's like 10 things I want to read right now yeah I mean it's a great problem to have if you are looking for great books to read but you know it's such a change from the thinking last year when Publishers were looking ahead to 2020 and the election and everyone was saying you know you can't publish in the fall the country is going to be glued to the political drama we need to avoid late fall and now everything's coming out at once so it is pretty interesting and at the same time you know brick and mortar retail has recovered somewhat from the earlier days of the pandemic when a lot of stores were closed but bookstores are still really struggling so when there is a delay at the printer it kind of ripples through the whole publishing ecosystem so if bookstores can't get the copies in time that readers are order ing you know readers may try to find it somewhere else find it online or buy something else and so especially for authors whose books are selling well it can be a really frustrating problem all right here's what I want to know I know that you are looking forward to reading Kazo ishiguro's next book but that's not until the spring what are you most looking forward to this fall well I haven't read the new Elena fante yet and it's gotten a tremendous review from parl seel and a really interesting profile of her translator so that's something I'm really looking forward to I'm interested in Homeland elies by aadar I liked his earlier work and there are just so many books coming out there's a new Marilyn Robinson I'm probably going to have to just take a couple weeks off to read I hope that's okay yes we're allowed to take reading vacations here Alexandra thanks so much thanks for having me joining us now to talk about what we're reading my colleagues Greg Kohl's and Nora hey guys hey Pamela hi Pamela all right Greg let's start with you what are you reading this week I'm reading Maggie o Farrell's new novel hamnet which as readers of Geraldine Brooks's very favorable cover review in the book review will know is about Shakespeare's family it's subtitled the novel of the plague which tells you in some ways how timely it is it is a novel about Shakespeare's family and specifically the death of his son hamnet you ask what I've been reading this week the truth is U it's a little bit of a shameful truth I've been reading it for like a month now one thing about the pandemic is as happy as I am not to be commuting anymore I used my commuting time to read and now I use my commuting time to walk and so it's cut into my reading time a lot and I find I'm I'm just reading like a couple of pages before bed every night and so things are taking me much longer and this has been a long read for me but not because it's a slog of a book at all to the contrary it is completely immersive it is a book that gets deep into the domestic realm of Shakespeare's World it brings impressive light to bear on the unacknowledged hard work of women in maintaining order in that world I I say it's about Shakespeare's family but really Shakespeare himself is kind of a sidelined character in it it's very much a book about Shakespeare's wife Agnes and her relationship to the family one thing that I really love about Agnes as a character is that she demonstrates this satisfying display of competence and knowledge in a way that I always respond to whether it's coming from mcgyver or from Agnes Shakespeare it's this familiarity with the natural world and this intuition and adaptability she collects Roots she keeps bees when we meet her she has a hunting Kestrel as a pet there's like almost a touch of the shaman to her and the book feels like I said incredibly timely it's a novel of the plague there's this running sense of kind of dread and fear of this disease nobody understands the measures that might keep us safe whether it's quarantine or masks or medicine there's this debate about what you need to do to avoid the plague for the last week while I was reading it for almost a week I had no electricity at my house this cooking by fire all the things that that you read about in this book one effect of the book was to underline how much continuity there is between different historical eras o farell makes just the clearly deliberate and inspired choice to sideline Shakespeare as a character he's there but she never names him um interestingly it it becomes kind of a running joke he's always just the husband or the brother or the glov Maker's son and so it's about Agnes and through her it's a novel about a certain kind of remarkable capable woman carving out her own place and a world where that's not easy or expected have you read her previous books I have not I I've heard good things about her Memoir I am I am I am which was framed around a series of near-death experiences that she had places where she might have died but didn't but I have not read that book and I had not heard of her before that book so so this is my introduction to her nor what are you reading so I am reading mating which is Norman Rush's first novel for which he won the national book award and I'd never read him before but way back at the beginning of March my aunt had kind of put it in my hands and told me I must read so it's been kind of just sitting at the top of my pile for the past few months as I've been flitting around and reading a lot of shorter things but then last week I picked it up because I just wanted I wanted something you know meaty and long and that I could just sink my teeth into and it's it's definitely been that I'm I'm only 150 pages in of 500 so far but I'm really enjoying it and and basically it's about this the narrator is an unnamed Anthropologist working in batswana and she kind of abandons her project it's not working out but then embarks on these series of romantic entanglements and ends up pursuing this man you know this very popular intellectual called Nelson Jon who is forming this sort of utopic community in the middle of the Kalahari so so I have a lot more to read but but this narrator is just amazing and so astute and funny and uses a lot of words that I have never encountered um so it's been a real uh intellectual and emotional Journey so far are you reading it with a dictionary at your side I definitely should be there are there are so many words that I I am also kind of doing the Bedtime reading because yeah I'm just walking a lot more to clear my mind so it's not always the most relaxing to have to look up kind of every other every other word I encounter but but I'm definitely definitely learning some new ones so we should let our listeners know since Nora is a new voice to the podcast that she is also somewhat new to our desk she is our fellow for this year and has been thrust into our archives as part of a a big project so I imagine the walking to clear your head thing probably has a lot to do with like the state of the world but I feel also we're probably a little bit responsible for here at the book review I don't know about that but it it certainly is when when you're spending all day combing through all of our archival issues it's nice to kind of just look at the world around you Pamela what are you reading I spoke last week about Yoko ogawa's the memory police and the book I want to talk about this week is is Lydia Mill it's a children's Bible and I read them back toback and they are both kind of very dark dystopian books that I really appreciated after having read them and didn't so much enjoy the reading experience itself which I think is really no fault of these books but more a fault of the World At Large which is to say I have no appetite right now for reading very dark things about the end of the world and and you know ominous Futures because I I feel immersed in that already I have more enjoyed during the last few months reading books that have nothing whatsoever to do with the current state of the planet if all the books I could read take place on a fictional planet in a universe in a galaxy very far away I'd be happy but it's a really good book um I should say in its favor as was the memory police which I I really thought was excellent this book is a slender novel um Lydia was on the podcast earlier this pandemic to talk about it and she's been on the podcast before it's a kind of allegorical novel that as you can tell from the title sort of mirrors a children's Bible and I have to say I had some trepidation in approaching this novel because I am biblically illiterate I did have a children's Bible but essentially once it got to can and Abel I was out you know I I really enjoyed the flood and I liked you know the Carden of Eden I mean liked it as one does a good mythological tale which is how I read them having really grown up in a not religious household but then once it got to like the slaying of Brothers as much as I had those urges towards my own Brothers at certain points in my childhood I just I was kind of done with the Bible so I a lot of this I think really did go over my head there was a class in college that I always meant to take which was the Bible as literature but it was at 900 a.m. and I had sort of decided as a it's like now I look back at these decisions when makes when you're a student and I I can't imagine it's hard to Fathom the the depths of my stupidity but in my mind at the time like 9:00 a.m. was just not a class you were you you had to take as a college student so I never took that class and so a lot of this as I said I think goes over my head but it's a really interesting and ambitious book it takes place in a kind of unnamed vacation area I think you know I pictured it is somewhere Upstate New York where a group of families and their children have retreated for an extended vacation and then the end of the world basically happens in a series of kind of biblical cataclysmic events from storms to you know plague um there we are again to violence in the streets and and it's told from the perspective of the children it's a really great book I don't know if I'm selling it here but she's doing a lot of things and I think pulls it off very well I've read maybe the first 50 pages of it it starts out as this kind of Garden of Eden all these families together at this summer house and the kids are separated from the parents kind of generationally I just off it's almost like the Peanuts characters where the charact where the parents don't matter and and there was something that felt like the Box Car children or something about it to me I Lov Lydia Millet writing I I find her often very funny in a kind of Sly way going on underneath what's going on in the story and so I will certainly finish this book but I set it aside about 50 pages in and I haven't gone back to it yet nor have you read any Lydia Millet I have not I have not but I'm definitely intrigued I'm also a a Bible illiterate um but I hope to you know repair that at some point so this might be a good starting point this would be a really fun way to learn the Bible I think if Lydia Millet like heard that you were going to like get your biblical education for this book I think she'd probably be like profoundly pleased I took a Bible as literature class in high school I went to an Episcopal School and and so we had a a required Bible class that really approached as literature and history not literal history but kind of reading it through that lens and I have to say you missed something by skipping a class at 9:00 am it it has colored a lot of my readings since you realize how much the Bible is kind of everywhere in in our culture and in our literature yes I I am aware I'm well aware of my intellectual deficits here um no I one day I will take that class I for now Lydia Millet is my biblical guide all right let's run down the titles of the books that we read Greg starting with you I'm reading hamnet by Maggie o farell I'm reading mating by Norman rush and I just finished reading a children's Bible by Lydia Millet remember there's more at NY times.com / books and you can always write to us at books atny times.com I write back not right away but I do the book review podcast is produced by the great Pedro Rosado from head steer media with a major assist from my colleague John Williams thanks for listening for the New York Times I'm Pamela Paul [Music]