Military

Don't pay too much attention to the complaints about either the narrator or the author's conservative politics. The reader may bother some, but I listened to this book straight through over the course of several flights out west, and loved it -- the only time I took it out was literally at TSA. As for his political views - he is a Navy SEAL, from Texas, right? Seriously - the narration is fine, and the authors occasional politics asides are amusing and endearing even to a liberal like as me, Well worth the credit.

William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is easily among the top five history books I've read or listened to. Too be sure, some of the premier historians of this era, such is Richard Evans, may not agree that my characterization. But in my opinion, the fact that Shirer is a journalist, as distinct from an actual historian, should not be held against him.

Shirer's account of the history of the Reich - from the rise of the NSDAP brownshirts in the early 1930s, to the Reichstag fire and the death of the Weimar Republic, to the capture of Austria, Munich, the Battle of Britain, the aborted Operation Sealion, the launching of Barbarossa, and the ultimate dashing of Hitlers ambitions at the gates of Stalingrad and Moscow in 1941 and 1942 - is simply without parallel,

The book is meticulously researched, and Shirer's presence as a correspondent stationed in Berlin during the late 1930s and early 1940s make his analysis of the events of this period all the more insightful and intriguing. His insights Shirer derives from his first-hand experience in observing and even interacting with many of the leading men of the Party (Rohm, Strasser, etc), the Reich - (Goering, Himmler, etc), and the Wehrmacht - (Halder, Guderian, Kleist, etc.) - may be biased, but they are also brilliant and illuminating.

The meeting between Hitler, Ribbentrop, and Molotov to sign the Nazi-Soviet Pact, as British bombers streak overhead. The diary of General Halder. The halting of the Wehrmacht at the gates of Moscow in Dec. 1941. The descriptions of Hitler's speeches to party drones at meetings of the Reichstag, such as it existed at the time, and especially his rebuttal of FDR's letter requesting assurances of his peaceful intentions regarding the countries on his borders. Wow, what a time, and what a tradjedy - kudos to Shirer for recording in a manner that makes it come alive so many decades later.

Far too long. But it's that good, yes.

Command and Control tells two stories concurrently, alternating back and forth, from one to the other. The first story is the story of the Damascus incident, in which a Titan nuclear missile came close to exploding in Arkansas due to a series of oversights which, as the author documents, are not nearly as rare as the public might suppose. The second story is the history of nuclear weapons themselves - their use, development, design, and testing, as well as their technical limitations (or lack thereof) and the strategic calculations that drove their development and deployment during the Cold War.

The first narrative, which recounts the Damascus incident, is illuminating and entertaining, but at times it also feels overly drawn-out and confusing. This is largely due to the way its telling is broken up over the course of the book. This structure might work better in print, but I found it challenging in audio format. The second narrative - where the author traces the history of nuclear weapons broadly, from the Manhattan Project to the present, is where the book really excels. It is first-rate. I would listen this portion of the again, for sure, and recommend it to others interested in the subject without any reservation.

On the whole, a very good book.

The discussion of thermonuclear weapons, as opposed to pure fission bombs, and how the former fundamentally altered the strategic calculus about the use of nuclear weapon in war. In the modern era, we do not really distinguish between the awesome but comprehensible power of fission bombs, and the truly cataclysmic and unthinkable force of thermonuclear weapons, but the distinction was actually a major turning point in the way these weapons were viewed by political and military leaders. A second highlight was the author's excellent history of the U.S. Strategic Air Command, and its rivalry with the other military services and the (civilian) U.S. Atomic Energy Commission for primacy in the control U.S. nuclear weapons capabilities.