"Kim Stanley Robinson - A History Of The Twentieth Century, With Illustrations" - читать интересную книгу автора (Robinson Kim Stanley)

peasants, killed because Stalin wanted to collectivize agriculture. Food
was deliberately shipped out of that breadbasket region, emergency
supplies withheld, hidden stockpiles destroyed; and several thousand
villages disappeared as all their occupants starved. This was total war.

Every morning Frank leafed around in the big catalogue volumes, as if he
might find some other twentieth century. He filled out his slips, picked
up the books requested the previous day, took them back to his carrel. He
spent more time reading than writing. The days were cloudy, and it was dim
under the great dome. His notes were getting scrambled. He had stopped
working in chronological order, and kept returning compulsively to the
Great War, even though the front wave of his reading was well into World
War Two.
Twenty million had died in the first war, fifty million in the second.
Civilian deaths made the bulk of the difference. Near the end of the war,
thousands of bombs were dropped on cities in the hope of starting
firestorms, in which the atmosphere itself was in effect ignited, as in
Dresden, Berlin, Tokyo. Civilians were the target now, and strategic
bombing made them easy to hit. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were in that sense a
kind of exclamation point, at the end of a sentence which the war had been
saying all along: we will kill your families at home. War is war, as
Sherman said; if you want peace, surrender. And they did.
After two bombs. Nagasaki was bombed three days after Hiroshima, before
the Japanese had time to understand the damage and respond. Dropping the
bomb on Hiroshima was endlessly debated in the literature, but Frank found
few who even attempted a defense of Nagasaki. Truman and his advisors did
it, people said, to a) show Stalin they had more than one bomb, and b)
show Stalin that they would use the bomb even as a threat or warning only,
as Nagasaki demonstrated. A Vietnam Memorial's worth of civilians in an
instantaneous flash, just so Stalin would take Truman seriously. Which he
did.
When the crew of the Enola Gay landed, they celebrated with a barbeque.

In the evenings Frank sat in the Dowland flat in silence. He did not read,
but watched the evening summer light leak out of the sky to the north. The
days were getting shorter. He needed the therapy, he could feel it. More
light! Someone had said that on their deathbed - Newton, Galileo, Spinoza,
someone like that. No doubt they had been depressed at the time.
He missed Charles and Rya. He would feel better, he was sure, if he had
them there to talk with. That was the thing about friends, after all: they
lasted and you could talk. That was the definition of friendship.
But Charles and Rya were in Florida. And in the dusk he saw that the walls
of books in the flat functioned like lead lining in a radioactive
environment, all those recorded thoughts forming a kind of shield against
poisonous reality. The best shield available, perhaps. But now it was
failing, at least for him; the books appeared to be nothing more than
their spines.
And then one evening in a premature blue sunset it seemed that the whole
flat had gone transparent, and that he was sitting in an armchair,
suspended over a vast and shadowy city.