"The battlefield is everywhere" - by Alex Wellerstein
When I was an undergraduate, I really enjoyed the serendipity of “mining” the massive, subterranean stacks of the Doe Library at UC Berkeley. One could look up books one knew were relevant to a topic, or search for keywords, but the real unexpected gold was in the stuff next to whatever you were looking for, because of the quirks of the Dewey Decimal System. It’s something that I think is much more alien to students today (though they have their own sources of serendipity, I expect) and the transition to a more search-centric, all-online approach. But that was how I found some truly odd books over time, and a few real treasures in the mix.
One of these was the highly eccentric Nuclear War Atlas by William Wheeler Bunge, published in 1988. Bunge was a “radical geographer” who believed that good cartography could be a political argument in and of itself, and a method for pushing a strong political agenda. He had (I later learned) published a poster-sized version of The Nuclear War Atlas in 1982:
The 1988 book took the same images and coupled them with considerably more text and some additional diagrams, and makes for an improvement, I think, even though the poster is a fascinating artifact in and of itself (if slightly deranged looking, from afar).
