"Explains critical technological developments and the policies that drove weapons innovation within the context of the specific environments and communities where testing actually took place ... [and] emphasizes the people who participated, protested, or were affected by atomic testing and explains the decision-making process that resulted in these people and places becoming the only locations and groups to actually experience nuclear warfare during the Cold War"--
Masters of Doom is the amazing true story of the Lennon and McCartney of video games: John Carmack and John Romero. Together, they ruled big business. They transformed popular culture. And they provoked a national controversy. More than anything, they lived a unique and rollicking American Dream, escaping the broken homes of their youth to co-create the most notoriously successful game franchises in history—Doom and Quake—until the games they made tore them apart. Americans spend more money on video games than on movie tickets. Masters of Doom is the first book to chronicle this industry’s greatest story, written by one of the medium’s leading observers. David Kushner takes readers inside the rags-to-riches adventure of two rebellious entrepreneurs who came of age to shape a generation. The vivid portrait reveals why their games are so violent and why their immersion in their brilliantly designed fantasy worlds offered them solace. And it shows how they channeled their fury and imagination into products that are a formative influence on our culture, from MTV to the Internet to Columbine. This is a story of friendship and betrayal, commerce and artistry—a powerful and compassionate account of what it’s like to be young, driven, and wildly creative. “To my taste, the greatest American myth of cosmogenesis features the maladjusted, antisocial, genius teenage boy who, in the insular laboratory of his own bedroom, invents the universe from scratch. Masters of Doom is a particularly inspired rendition. Dave Kushner chronicles the saga of video game virtuosi Carmack and Romero with terrific brio. This is a page-turning, mythopoeic cyber-soap opera about two glamorous geek geniuses—and it should be read while scarfing down pepperoni pizza and swilling Diet Coke, with Queens of the Stone Age cranked up all the way.”—Mark Leyner, author of I Smell Esther Williams
It's another ordinary day in Food Town, and Nancy McNutty, peanut butter sandwich and rookie reporter, desperately needs a big break. So when news comes in of a monster doughnut on the rampage, she's on the case. And boy, is that doughnut hungry! It's eating everything in sight, and not even the police, the fire department, or the military can bring it down. Whatever will President Bacon do? They need a plucky hero to save the day for the good of all food kind!
Eight scholars examine the range of cultural expressions of atomic energy from the 1940s to the early twenty-first century, including comic books, nuclear landscapes, mushroom-cloud postcards, the Los Alamos suburbs, uranium-themed board games, future atomic waste facilities, and atomic-themed films such as 'Dr. Strangelove' and 'The Atomic Kid'. Despite the growing interest in atomic culture and history, the body of relevant scholarship is relatively sparse. Atomic Culture opens new doors into the field by providing a substantive, engaging, and historically based consideration of the topic that will appeal to students and scholars of the Atomic Age as well as general readers.
"All disasters are in some sense man-made." Setting the annus horribilis of 2020 in historical perspective, Niall Ferguson explains why we are getting worse, not better, at handling disasters. Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises. and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. But when disaster strikes, we ought to be better prepared than the Romans were when Vesuvius erupted, or medieval Italians when the Black Death struck. We have science on our side, after all. Yet in 2020 the responses of many developed countries, including the United States, to a new virus from China were badly bungled. Why? Why did only a few Asian countries learn the right lessons from SARS and MERS? While populist leaders certainly performed poorly in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, Niall Ferguson argues that more profound pathologies were at work--pathologies already visible in our responses to earlier disasters. In books going back nearly twenty years, including Colossus, The Great Degeneration, and The Square and the Tower, Ferguson has studied the foibles of modern America, from imperial hubris to bureaucratic sclerosis and online fragmentation. Drawing from multiple disciplines, including economics, cliodynamics, and network science, Doom offers not just a history but a general theory of disasters, showing why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are getting worse at handling them. Doom is the lesson of history that this country--indeed the West as a whole--urgently needs to learn, if we want to handle the next crisis better, and to avoid the ultimate doom of irreversible decline.
In December 1993, gaming changed forever. id Software's seminal shooter DOOM was released, and it shook the foundations of the medium. Daniel Pinchbeck brings together the complete story of DOOM for the first time. This book takes a look at the early days of first-person gaming and the video game studio system. It discusses the prototypes and the groundbreaking technology that drove the game forward and offers a detailed analysis of gameplay and level design. Pinchbeck also examines DOOM's contributions to wider gaming culture, such as online multiplay and the modding community, and the first-person gaming genre, focusing on DOOM's status as a foundational title and the development of the genre since 1993. Pinchbeck draws extensively from primary data: from the game itself, from the massive fan culture surrounding the title, and from interviews with the developers who made it. This book is not only the definitive work on DOOM but a snapshot of a period of gaming history, a manifesto for a development ethos, and a celebration of game culture at its best.
Twelve-year-old Rory and his friend Izzy try to foil the plans of Lord Foxglove, for whom Rory works as a valet, and his inhuman accomplices from taking over the world.--
Tucked up against the Rocky Mountains, just west of Denver, sits the remnants of one of the most notorious nuclear weapons sites in North America: Rocky Flats. With a history of environmental catastrophes, political neglect, and community-wide health crises, this site represents both one of the darkest and most controversial chapters in our nation's history, and also a conundrum on repurposing lands once considered lost. As the crush of encroaching residential areas close in on this site and the generation of Rocky Flats workers passes on, the memory of Rocky Flats is receding from the public mind; yet the need to responsibly manage the site, and understand the consequences of forty years of plutonium production and contamination, must be a part of every decision for the land's future.
From the national bestselling author of Weave of Absence comes a mystery set in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where weaving studio owner Della Wright finds herself tangled up in murder…. Della and her friend Jenny are remodeling Dream Weaver, turning their shared business space into two separate shops. But after the work is completed, building inspector Howard Swanson refuses to grant Jenny the permit to reopen her coffee shop. Determined to get to the bottom of the hold-up, Della heads to Howard’s office to defend Jenny’s livelihood, only to find the inspector dead—and the police spinning a yarn about Della being responsible. Although Della’s boyfriend, Matthew, an ex-FBI criminologist, claims there’s no need to worry, Della is convinced that the cops have it in for her. Now she must nab the real killer before she’s shuttled off to jail…. FEATURES WEAVING TIPS!
A professor of Linguistics in a Gulf Coast college town causes an accident that destroys his marriage and sends him into a breakdown, in which he perceives that the world is falling apart with him. Even his language becomes fractured, in a parallel to the Biblical story of the Tower of Babel.
