Books, Arts & Manners: The Bomb Detector

By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, by Paul Boyer (Pantheon, 440 pp„ $22.50)

Paul Boyer shares the political sentiments of the anti-nuke establishment, but his main concern in By the Bomb’s Early Light is reclamation, not speculation. His focus is America in the first five years of the Atomic Age, a nation presumptively reeling from the psychic aftershocks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Drawing on a variety of sources from 1945 to 1950, he covers an amorphous territory that he calls “the fundamental ground of culture and consciousness” with the precision and skill of the veteran historical surveyor he is. (Among his previous works are Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America and, with Stephen Nessenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft.) His purpose is touchingly traditional, his conclusion eminently reasonable:

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Thomas Doherty

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By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age, by Paul Boyer (Pantheon, 440 pp„ $22.50)

Paul Boyer shares the political sentiments of the anti-nuke establishment, but his main concern in By the Bomb’s Early Light is reclamation, not speculation. His focus is America in the first five years of the Atomic Age, a nation presumptively reeling from the psychic aftershocks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Drawing on a variety of sources from 1945 to 1950, he covers an amorphous territory that he calls “the fundamental ground of culture and consciousness” with the precision and skill of the veteran historical surveyor he is. (Among his previous works are Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America and, with Stephen Nessenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft.) His purpose is touchingly traditional, his conclusion eminently reasonable: