Michael C. Kenney

This meticulously crafted study by Lynn Eden explores how and why U.S. military planners failed to predict nuclear fire damage for several decades even as it prepared the country to fight strategic nuclear war. Eden, senior research scholar at Stanford University's Center for International Security and Cooperation, painstakingly unpacks this riddle through exhaustive historical research and organizational analysis of the first-order. Whole World on Fire is a paragon of the sort of historical-ethnographic work to which I aspire, and its author, Lynn Eden, is herself a model of the intellectual acumen and generosity that sustains the academic enterprise.