Frenchman Flat

[Else is] a limber writer, equally alive to atrocity and irony. – Dan Piepenbring * Harper’s Magazine *
Else, a filmmaker and journalist, writes powerfully and elegantly, and his moral compass never wavers. – Kate Tuttle * Boston Globe *
Magisterial…Through absorbing, sharp-eyed prose, the book traces the entire history of atomic bombs…Poetic, haunting descriptions of nuclear explosions relay their terrific and terrifying scale for the majority of people who, mercifully, have never seen one…a gripping account of how close the world came—and could come again—to nuclear annihilation. – Eileen Gonzalez * Foreword Reviews (starred) *
Propulsive…an important account of nuclear hubris and its incompletely tallied costs. * Kirkus Reviews (starred) *
Frenchman Flat is a sweeping, gripping history of the atomic age. Jon Else writes with precision, conjuring the Nevada Test Site’s blasted landscape as both monument and warning. From the blinding flash of Priscilla to the painstaking treaty negotiations that pulled the world from the brink, Else renders this history viscerally human. It is, with humanity again under siege, a book for our times. – Greg Grandin, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The End of the Myth
No one is better qualified to write this story than Jon Else, who has been close to the subject for decades. He tells the tale with haunting, uncommon grace. – Adam Hochschild, author of American Midnight
Here, for the first time in such rich, on-the-ground detail, is the rest of the story of how we walked hand in hand with Armageddon through the first eighty years of the Nuclear Age. We still do. – Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Vivid and unnerving, Frenchman Flat captures the nuclear ‘practice’ targeting of, well, most everything. He brings us to the fragmented, abandoned sites and to those who witnessed, worked, and suffered in these broken, radioactive zones. In a time of worldwide nuclear nationalism, Else memorializes and warns. – Peter Galison, author of Einstein’s Clocks, Poincaré’s Maps

Jon Else

Jon Else is a documentary filmmaker and Professor Emeritus at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. He is a MacArthur Fellow, a two-time Oscar nominee, and a five-time Emmy winner. Else produced and directed The Day After Trinity, the first film ever made about J. Robert Oppenheimer. He also served as series producer and cinematographer for Henry Hampton’s Eyes on the Prize.

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