Embracing Mystery: Radiation Risks and Popular Science Writing in the Early Cold War.

Narrative form is crucial to the understanding of science in popular culture. This is particularly true with subjects such as radiation, in which the technical details at hand are often remote from everyday experience-as well as contested or uncertain among experts. This article examines the narrative choices made by three popular texts that publicized radiation risks to the public during the Cold War: John Hersey's Hiroshima, David Bradley's No Place to Hide, and Ralph Lapp's The Voyage of the Lucky Dragon. It contends that each author borrowed from well-established literary genres and that this borrowing was crucial to coherence and effective messaging of the argument. At the same time, placing the arguments in such a familiar form served to blunt some of the radical potential in those same messages.

Why we write (nuclear) history.

Nuclear history always compels. Scholars (and readers) can immerse themselves in the existential threat posed by the atomic bomb and its successor weapons, the tantalizing prospect of carbon-free energy, or the study of a natural phenomenon deeply at odds with our everyday experience of the world. There is thus always something profound at stake when we write nuclear history - be it physical, economic or intellectual. And while it may seem that the end of the Cold War should have diminished the academic attention accorded to the subject, it actually just allowed the historiography to evolve. To the wealth of technical and political studies that once dominated nuclear history, we can now add a host of excellent cultural, environmental, literary and transnational studies. Those of us who entered the field shortly after the break-up of the Soviet Union have been able to follow these developments first-hand, from the initial uncertainty of where nuclear history would go without its original raison d'être to seeing the possibilities opened up in a post-Cold War world. The books under review here provide important and timely additions to this historiography. Luis A. Campos's Radium and the Secret Life provides a rigorous and compelling account of the uses of radium in early twentieth-century biology; Timothy J. Jorgensen's Strange Glow: The Story of Radiation offers an accessible and illuminating analysis of the benefits and risks of radiation. The books also make for a fascinating juxtaposition. They complement each other well, but also contain some intriguing differences that allow us to reflect on the nature of nuclear history in the early twenty-first century.

How to make a villain: Rachel Carson and the politics of anti-environmentalism.

This article explores the evolution of anti-Carson rhetoric. It argues that this rhetoric has evolved significantly over the past fifty years. Early critics of Silent Spring were primarily concerned with defending their vision of science from what they perceived as the threat embodied in Carson's ecological perspective. By the early twenty-first century, her main detractors were now neoliberal advocates of unfettered markets, who perceived in Carson a major reason for what they saw as related evils: environmentalism and an expanded state. These two sets of adversaries used distinct rhetorical strategies, corresponding to their different interests as well as to changing historical context. Across both eras, however, the perceived utility of Carson as an anti-heroine persisted.

Constructing a scientist: expert authority and public images of Rachel Carson.

This article uses the voluminous public discourse around Rachel Carson and her controversial bestseller "Silent Spring" to explore Americans' views on science and scientists. Carson provides a particularly interesting case study because of intense and public debates over whether she was a scientist at all, and therefore whether her book should be granted legitimacy as science. Her career defied easy classification, as she acted variously as writer, activist, and environmentalist in addition to scientist. Defending her work as legitimate science, which many though not all commentators did, therefore became an act of defining what both science and scientists could and should be. This article traces the variety of nonscientific images and narratives readers and writers assigned to Carson, such as 'reluctant crusader' and 'scientist-poet'. It argues that nonscientific attributes were central to legitimating her as both admirable person and admirable scientist. It explores how debates over "Silent Spring" can be usefully read as debates over the desirability of putatively nonscientific attributes in the professional work of a scientist. And it examines the nature of Carson's very democratized image for changing notions of science and scientists in 1960s United States politics and culture.