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100 Suns | 
 enlarge | Author: Michael Light
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $49.95
Buy New: $30.99
You Save: $18.96 (38%)
New (25) Used (13) from $28.48
Rating:  27 reviews
Sales Rank: 90957
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 208
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3.8
Dimensions (in): 13.5 x 11.3 x 1
ISBN: 1400041139
Dewey Decimal Number: 779.9623451190973
EAN: 9781400041138
ASIN: 1400041139
Publication Date: October 21, 2003
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: BRAND NEW
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Product Description
Between July 1945 and November 1962 the United States is known to have conducted 216 atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests. After the Limited Test Ban Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1963, nuclear testing went underground. It became literally invisible—but more frequent: the United States conducted a further 723 underground tests, the last in 1992. 100 Suns documents the era of visible nuclear testing, the atmospheric era, with one hundred photographs drawn by Michael Light from the archives at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the U.S. National Archives in Maryland. It includes previously classified material from the clandestine Lookout Mountain Air Force Station based in Hollywood, whose film directors, cameramen and still photographers were sworn to secrecy.
The title, 100 Suns, refers to the response by J.Robert Oppenheimer to the world’s first nuclear explosion in New Mexico when he quoted a passage from the Bhagavad Gita, the classic Vedic text: “If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst forth at once in the sky, that would be like the splendor of the Mighty One . . . I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” This was Oppenheimer’s attempt to describe the otherwise indescribable. 100 Suns likewise confronts the indescribable by presenting without embellishment the stark evidence of the tests at the moment of detonation. Since the tests were conducted either in Nevada or the Pacific the book is simply divided between the desert and the ocean. Each photograph is presented with the name of the test, its explosive yield in kilotons or megatons, the date and the location. The enormity of the events recorded is contrasted with the understated neutrality of bare data. Interspersed within the sequence of explosions are pictures of the awestruck witnesses.
The evidence of these photographs is terrifying in its implication while at same time profoundly disconcerting as a spectacle. The visual grandeur of such imagery is balanced by the chilling facts provided at the end of the book in the detailed captions, a chronology of the development of nuclear weaponry and an extensive bibliography. A dramatic sequel to Michael Light’s Full Moon, 100 Suns forms an unprecedented historical document.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 22 more reviews...
 What this book is about January 4, 2008
E. Cuadra (Barcelona, Spain)
100 Suns is a great book that shows the american nuclear tests from an "artistic" perspective. The images and the edition are spectacular, and the choice of the pictures depends only on his compilator, Michael Light.
Anyway, if you are looking for an exhaustive nuclear test data, nuclear technology or nuclear consequences, definitely this is not your book.
But if you can abstract the mortal power from the breath-taking image that a nuclear explosion owns, then you've got the book of the year.
Greetings from Barcelona, Spain
 Very Poorly Formatted November 18, 2007
A Reader (Long Beach, CA USA)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
If you're buying this book to have beautiful photographic prints of the major nuclear tests, you will definitely be disappointed, as I was, by the book's very poor format/layout. The overwhelming majority of the photographs are printed in such a way that the image is split apart where the paper joins the spine of the book. In other words, you get maybe three-quarters of the photograph on one page, and the remaining quarter on the facing page. What's worse is that many of the photographs are split right in the middle, so the image is completely ruined. I can't believe that they were so stupid as to produce the book in this way. If I had know it was this bad, I wouldn't have wasted my money.
sunny side up September 4, 2007
B. McDonald (NZ)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a beautiful book. Very powerful (no pun intended). Exceptionally well-conceived. Lovely art direction. High printing standards. All of which were established with the author Michael Light's previous book, The Moon. (With a surname such as Light, he was destined to be a photographer.) I first saw a copy of 100 Suns at a friend's place in Paris and, without knowing it was the same photographer who had collated the pictures in both books, said how much its aesthetics and purpose reminded me of The Moon. Rather than NASA's various explorations to the lunar mass (assuming you believe, like me, that they did indeed go to the moon), this book is devoted to the war-mongering Americans' obsession with nuclear warfare. As a counter-balance to the predilection of other superpowers, such as the former USSR and China, for power, the Americans went for gold from the outset, initially possessing a ridiculously huge nuclear arsenal, a dominance that wained during the supposed Cold War (a propaganda exercise to rival the Nazis, if ever there was one). Then, for a spell, the Soviets possessed more nuclear warheads than the Americans, which is perhaps fair enough since they did send the first man into space (well done Yuri). However, throughout the atomic age, the Americans, like the pesky French, the irritable Russians, the stroppy North Koreans, the determined Chinese, the desperate Pakistanis, the resolute Iranians, etc, have continued to conduct tests of nuclear weapons. Unfairly, the French have even arrogantly and selfishly pursued theirs in the Pacific, which, as New Zealanders, my family, friends and I occupy. Is it any wonder we now have global warming? Isn't it at all conceivable that the hundreds, perhaps thousands, of nuclear tests conducted underground, on land, at sea and in the air are partially (perhaps even largely) responsible for global warming? These are, after all, mammoth disruptions to the harmony of earth and her atmosphere. I use the word 'mammoth' on purpose too because, like the furry fellow, we may one day be utterly extinct. Of course, if nuclear weapons (and the woeful double bombing of Japan to end the Second World War) are a crucial counterbalance between good and evil, the haves and will haves, they are perhaps a necessary (yet problematic) deterrent. Now, having jumped atop my soap box (actually, bar stool in front of my computer), I must admit that the pictures in 100 Suns are utterly bewitching. To say they are beautiful is fraught with guilt, since it is members of our very species who created and propagated such an evil force. However, in many things evil a kind of beauty resides, whether we wish to concede this or not. And there is something strangely, hypnotically, philosophically haunting about the 100 pictures of nuclear tests in this book. They look like amoeba, jelly fish, demons, and, yes, mushrooms. They appear to be the visual manifestation of some weird hallucinatory concoction - though in this case it's the result of mankind's intellect run amock. Not enough is spoken about the nuclear age. The pictures in this must-have book say much. Let the buyer beware.
Stark beauty of a devastating weapon July 9, 2007
Eugene Mah (Charleston, SC USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As terrible as a nuclear detonation can be, this book manages to capture the spectacle and beauty from the above-ground nuclear tests conducted at the Nevada Test Site and other detonation sites in the 50s and 60s.
The book is a collection of 100 colour and B&W photos from the US National Archives and LANL of various detonations. Some are taken mere milliseconds after detonation and show fascinating detail. Others show the detonations with soldiers looking on. Aerial shots show the impressive scale of the detonations.
Captions for the photos giving details on the test are listed in the back so as not to distract from the photo itself. It's an interesting book to look through and to see the scale of the above-ground nuclear weapon testing that was done in the middle of the 20th century.
100 suns June 4, 2007
L. THOMAS
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Some of the most brilliant photos of nuclear explosions you will EVER find. The book is almost all photos with a small documentary section in the back to help augment the photos. VERY nicely done for the non-technical person.
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