GOOD READING

R.W. Grant, author of The Incredible Bread Machine and Trashing Nuclear Power has broken out with a marvelous new book, Rent Control and the War Against the Poor (202 pp., sftbd., $10 ppd. from Quandary House, Box m, Manhattan Beach, CA 90266; for $23 you get all three books; quantity discounts avail-able). This is vintage Grant, cold logic coupled with his superb humor. Tops! Tops!

Pesticides: Helpful or Harmful? is outstanding even in the excellent company of other ACSH booklets. If you fell for the hoax that DDT causes thinning of egg shells, do not miss it; if you didn't, get it anyway. It is rich in important and authoritative information of the type that gets strictly censored by the Great American Brainwash Machine. (58 pp., $3, ACSH, 1995 Broadway, 18^th floor, New York NY 10023).

Some dud novel in the 1940s started selling when its publish-ers retitled it Confessions of a Paris Prostitute. The opposite seems to have happened with a book called The Deadly Element by L. Bickel (Stein & Day, 1980), whose cover is full of mushroom clouds and talk about TMI. However, the inside (312 pp) is a very readable and unbiased account of the story of uranium, which I bought for $3 in a remainder sale by mail from Bookseller E.R. Hamilton, Falls Village, CT 06031-5000.

On Dec. 1, I appeared in the Morton Downey Jr TV Show together with two other scientists and three anti-nukes. Quality tapes (VHS) of the shouting match are available for $7 from reader Ken Seger, 763 Haw Thicket, Des Peres, MO 63131.

Happy Holidays to Everybody!