Thursday, February 07, 2008

What is Jonathan B. Tucker reading?

The latest featured contributor to Writers Read: Jonathan B. Tucker, editor of Toxic Terror: Assessing Terrorist Use of Chemical and Biological Weapons and the author of Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox and War of Nerves: Chemical Warfare from World War I to Al-Qaeda.

Last year he applied the Page 99 Test to War of Nerves.

Tucker is a Senior Fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

His entry opens:
Browsing the other day in Kramerbooks, my favorite neighborhood bookstore in Washington, D.C., I came across a paperback edition of The File, a book published in 1997 by the British contemporary historian Timothy Garton Ash. The back cover explained that the book was a true story based on the author’s discovery after the fall of the Berlin Wall that the East German secret police, or Ministry for State Security — better known by its German nickname Stasi — had compiled a security file on him while he was researching his Ph.D. dissertation in West and East Berlin in the late 1970s and early 1980s. During this period, Garton Ash traveled frequently to Poland on journalistic assignment, and he was romantically involved for a time with an East German woman. Having recently spent a year in Berlin on a Fulbright fellowship, I have a strong interest in the former East Germany and therefore bought the book as an impulse purchase. [read on]
Writers Read: Jonathan B. Tucker.

--Marshal Zeringue