One Damn Thing After Another

The title of this "sort of memoir" is borrowed from Mark Twain's observation that life is "just one damn thing after another." Its author--a professor who taught the history of the Cold War for nearly four decades--originally intended the book's readership to be limited to prospective grandchildren. But the stories within--about the vicissitudes of academic life; 'Sixties protests against the Vietnam War; my brief stint as an intelligence analyst on the CIA's Soviet desk; a subsequent, 15-year career as a department chair and curator at the Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museum; summers spent at a Cape Cod cabin and other, international travels (including an arrest in Mexico for terrorism)--may also appeal to a broader audience. As Mark Twain also wrote: "No narrative that tells the facts of a man's life in the man's own words, can be uninteresting."
Gregg Herken is the author of five books on nuclear history, including The Georgetown Set: Friends and Rivals in Cold War Washington (Knopf, 2014), and Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (Henry Holt, 2002), a finalist for the 2003 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in History.