“Shapiro’s treatise provides an original, ambitious, contentious, compelling hybrid of searching film scholarship, humanist mysiticsm, autobiography, and polemic.
In parts diatribe, insigh, anedote, and polemic, Atomic Bomb Cinema performes a kind of explosion.” — Akira Mizuta Lippit University of California, Irvine Journal of Japanese Studies
“Besides employing his own considerable analytical powers, Shapiro draws on the work of Psychologists, scientists, novelists and film critics and will beet be appreciated by film scholars synecdochical and anagogic.” — Library Journal
“In an age of new anxiety and the fear of catastrophic terrorism with nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and new instructions from the federal government on civil defense, a timely new book, Jerome F. Shapiro’s AtomicBomb Cinema offers a rich historical analysis of the cultural consequences of apocalyptic anxiety on film… I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in American studies, political science, and cultural studies in general.” — Journal of American History
“Shapiro writes well…what emerges clearly is that there has been a relatively constant release of atomic bomb films over the entire period Shapiro addresses. AtomicBomb Cinema discusses their importance to the apocalyptic imagination admirably. Technology and Culture January 2003.”