Trudy E. Bell is an award-winning writer and the managing editor of the Journal of the Antique Telescope Society. She has taught scientific and technical writing and history of science, and has written or edited five books on science and technology, including three books in the New Solar System series. She has also written over 300 science articles for national publications including Smithsonian's Air and Space, Astronomy, Connoisseur, Family Circle, Muse, the Los Angeles Times, and Sky and Telescope.
Introduced by an essay on genocide by Michael Ignatieff, Simon Norfolk's series of photographs explore the worst of modern crimes committed by one group of people against another. He evokes the mass murdes in Cambodia under Pol Pot: Rwanda during the recent civil war; the mass gassing of Jews in Auschwitz; and more controversially the bombing of Dresden and the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. Many of the photographs are oddly serene and even beautiful but they all tell of man's capacity to excuse total annihilation on the grounds of race or creed. It may seem a cliche to say that these photographs are haunting, but they genuinely do bring forward the ghosts of our terrible history. (Kirkus UK)