Content area
Full text
Civil Defense Begins at Home: Militarization Meets Everyday Life in the Fifties. By Laura McEnaney. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. x, 213 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-69100138-3.)
Those of us alive in the 1950s vividly remember the "duck and cover" drills and the family bomb shelters that later became tornado shelters. Laura McEnaney provides the complex background that led to that nationwide movement and highlights its paradoxes and ironies. With the dropping of the atomic bomb and the beginning of the Cold War, American leaders struggled with the issue of preparedness. Whose responsibility was it? Should the military take control? Was it to be a civilian effort? How should it be funded? Should funding be taken away from offensive efforts to fund such defensive efforts? After much debate and hand wringing,...