2008 has been a year of fear and hope. Mighty financial institutions have collapsed overnight and America has elected its first African-American President. Apparently, Reinhold Niebuhr and Nietzsche are among Barack Obama's favorite authors, although I can't imagine he has had much time for reading this year. Which is a pity as there have been some great non-fiction titles published in 2008.

Read more on Kafka's mouse, or on 3QD

Christopher Hirst at The Independent has reviewed the paperback of Doomsday Men: "Humane and highly readable, this book concerns a black subject: the destruction of humanity (or a good chunk of it)." Read more here.

There was also a good review recently in the scholarly journal Survival: Global Politics and Strategy (Volume 50, Issue 5, 2008, pp 209-10). Bruno Tertrais writes:

"Doomsday Men by P.D. Smith tells the story of the 20th-century search for the perfect weapon. [...] Doomsday Men points out that many weapons scientists - including Haber, Sakharov, Szilard and others - saw themselves not only as helping their countries, but also humanity as a whole, and believed, as did Alfred Nobel of his invention of dynamite, that their efforts would save mankind from war. Smith also illuminates, in his valuable account, the interaction between science and literature, with scientists and authors constantly inspiring one another throughout the century. For instance, The World Set Free by H.G. Wells (1914), the first novel about nuclear war, was a source of inspiration for many scientific pioneers, including Szilard."

Two more great reviews of the paperback edition of Doomsday Men. The first is by Amber Pearson in the Daily Mail:

"From Adam and Eve to Dr Faustus and Dr Strangelove, the history - and popular culture - of the human race is littered with examples of our fatal fascination with the acquisition of knowledge. As PD Smith points out, Homo sapiens is the only species which knows it will die. So what is it that drives intelligent, rational men and women to push back the boundaries of science, knowing that their work will be used to develop ever more powerful methods of mass destruction? Written with all the pace of a thriller, this is a compelling, and ultimately extremely chilling, look at the way scientific discovery has always gone hand-in-hand with warfare, and it captures the sense of urgency and excitement felt in the race to create the atomic bomb."

The second is by Jon Swaine in today's Daily Telegraph:

"The story of the plan to create the C-bomb - a nu­clear bomb cap­able of dest­roy­ing all life on Earth - is chilling. Yet PD Smith's history, told with the joyful enthusiasm of a sci-fi aficionado, is also irresistible. Darting between history and biographies of the key scientists, Smith includes doomsday devices from fiction, showing how prescient some writers have (almost) proved. The tension at the story's heart - why their generation's most gifted scientists would seek to create potential apocalypse to preserve peace - endures, anchoring this surreal period drama in reality, 20 years after the end of the Cold War."

There are also a couple of my paperback reviews out this weekend in the Guardian - two very different but equally fascinating books:

Star Trek by Ina Hark (part of the BFI's excellent TV Classics series); and Tulipmania: Money, Honor, and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age, by Anne Goldgar.

Given the current turmoil in the financial system, Goldgar's book is certainly topical.

"This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service. This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons. Communications have been severely disrupted, and the number of casualties and the extent of the damage are not yet known. We shall bring you further information as soon as possible. Meanwhile, stay tuned to this wavelength, stay calm and stay in your homes."

This is what people in Britain would have heard on their radios if the country was attacked by nuclear weapons, according to documents just released.

Read more here.

If you were a physicist in the 1920s and 30s, all roads led to Copenhagen's Blegdamsvej 15. This was where Niels Bohr's Institute of Theoretical Physics was located.

The Ukrainian-born physicist George Gamow recalled that "the Institute buzzed with young theoretical physicists and new ideas about atoms, atomic nuclei, and the quantum theory in general"...

Read the rest of my Monday Column at 3 Quarks Daily or at Kafka's mouse.

Leckie concludes: "Smith does a fine job of diligent research and summary and then stern admonition: '... the doomsday men are still at work developing new ones. And as the memories of Ypres and Hiroshima fade, the temptation to use those weapons may grow.'"

Read more here.

Next week Companhia das Letras publishes the Brazilian edition of Doomsday Men.

Apparently, in Portuguese Dr Strangelove is translated as Dr. Fantástico.

The UK edition is now also available in paperback at Amazon, Waterstone's and your local bookshop.