Television dramas and reality

[mtbc]

I enjoyed the recent Deutschland 83 about Cold War nuclear tensions in, you might guess, East and West Germany in 1983, and, now into its fourth season, I also enjoy watching The Americans, about KGB agents living as Americans while acting for the Soviets in the Washington, DC, region.

mst3kmoxie challenged us to read a Pulitzer-prize-winning book this year: I chose David E. Hoffman's The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and its Dangerous Legacy. It makes for excellent reading: packed with interesting facts and not too dry. One pleasant surprise is how very accurate the history portrayed in Deutschland 83 turns out to be even within the West German military and East German intelligence services. I assume that the actual characters we see are fictional but the background, in terms of interaction between Moscow and the Stasi, their fears about Able Archer and suchlike, looks pretty spot-on. This also goes to some extent for The Americans: for instance, currently in the show we have Soviet interest in biowarfare agents and in the The Dead Hand I am presently reading a section about the weaponizing of smallpox, I think in around 1984.

So, not only is it a good book, but it is showing me that perhaps some popular dramas aren't quite as fictional as I typically assume.

Comments

[gerald_duck]

The one Pulitzer-Prize-winning book I'd unhesitatingly recommend to anyone, and especially to you, is Gödel, Escher, Bach. I assume you've already read it?

[mtbc]

Interesting; noted! Thank you. I had no idea it had won one. I, er, have owned it for many years but never read it. (!) Possibly through it being a casualty of my typical policy of favoring,

1. library books (like The Dead Hand) and otherwise-borrowed books so that I may promptly return them to their owners; indeed, I still have to re-borrow some to finish them


2. small & light or easygoing books, for when I am traveling or suchlike, and want something easy for hand luggage or that can still while away the hours even when I feel tired and not up to much


3. books of middling difficulty that are more informative than stimulating, to use as sleep aids.

I do however note that I know exactly where GEB is and it has survived multiple culls, including one before we moved from Ohio that reduced my library greatly once I realized that I didn't actually have to try to own everything that might be worth reading because there will always be libraries. So it's clearly still on the list!

Some books actually hit all three criteria at once, like Aquinas on God which I have yet to re-borrow and finish: I try to keep the list of half-read books short.