NONFICTION FAVORITES

A Fiery Peace In A Cold War Neil Sheehan (Random House, $32) A first-rate history of how the Cold War was conducted. As World War II ended, the two former allies immediately began to look upon each other with suspicion. Many events converged that pushed the U.S. and the USSR apart. Truman had little patience with Russia; he did not understand the effect of the terrible losses the Soviets had incurred during the War. (For every American killed, there were 27 Russian deaths—almost 12 million.) In any case, Stalin was a paranoid maniac. What Sheehan has done is to concentrate on one aspect of containment: building the anti-ballistic missile shield as a defense against the Soviet bomb. He focuses on some of the brilliant characters involved in the decision to build and man missiles, such as the lead scientists, Johnny Von Neuman, a Hungarian refugee, fiercely anti-Soviet and a brilliant physicist; and Werner von Braun, a completely amoral, former rocket-builder for Hitler. The center of the book is Bernard Schriever, who immigrated from Germany as a child, became a brilliant golfer, and a flier in the Air Force. This thoroughly decent man, a protégé of Hap Arnold, fought Curtis LeMay to build a defense rather than bank on an offensive program.

The Age Of The Unthinkable
Joshua Ramo
(Little, Brown, $25.99), 
Ramo is an economist who has ruminated through many think tanks and is now the managing director of Kissinger Associates, a geostrategic advisory firm. Quite in keeping with the subject of his alarmingly-titled book, Ramo is also a competitive aerobatic pilot. What begins as the foreboding argument that destabilization is inevitable, and even necessary, becomes a case for radical new ways of thinking—new ways of “thinking” that are ambiguously “unthinkable.”  Such innovative thought processes involve phenomena like power physics and mashups, a kind of perspective shared by artists, such as Picasso’s concept of Cubism or Anselm Kiefer’s painting, Deutchslands Geisteshelden; or the science of Danish physicist Per Bak.  The latter struggled with the limits of language to describe the states of “organized instability” he encountered in his work; he was confronting nonlinear science, which moves from the unthinkable to the indescribable.  Baffling? Yes.  Incomprehensible? No.

Shop Class As Soulcraft Matthew Crawford (Penguin Press, $25.95) Matthew Crawford began to question his satisfaction as a “knowledge worker,” and opened a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond. Shop Class as Soulcraft is an absorbing personal labor-history-cum-memoir, a philosophical treatise on the essence of work, and an analysis of America’s economic and vocational future, reminiscent of the classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Following Crawford through the mental and mechanical process of a manual trade will order, link, and electrify many of the vague discontents and notions you might have about the nature and quality of work and a good life in our times. This is an especially thought-provoking choice for college students or recent graduates.