Michel Anctil, Luminous Creatures: The History and Science of Light Production in Living Organisms Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2018. Pp. xvii + 467. ISBN: 978-0-7735-5312-5. $49.95 (hardback).

Lilienthal’s diaries to create a history we haven’t seen before. The book will be of great value to most readers with an interest in the history of nuclear science and technology or US military and political history. For professional historians this work should also take its place alongside literature on agnotology and archival silences, especially since Wellerstein takes care to focus on historian Henry DeWolf Smyth, who was commissioned to write a history of the Manhattan Project as it happened for release after the war. There is much to learn here both about the role historians play for the authorities and our role as critics of them, as well as the creation and maintenance of the source material we depend on. Historians of science should take special note of a point that is slightly off Wellerstein’s main line. In Section 3.1, Wellerstein takes up an argument introduced by Rebecca Press Schwartz that one of the reasons physics has loomed so large over other disciplines both in popular culture and in the history of science is that physicists had published the most on nuclear science at the time the US secrecy regime swallowed the subject. During the Second World War and for much of the Cold War, knowledge about nuclear chemistry, metallurgy, engineering and medicine was largely born secret (and one imagines this was not only true in the USA). As a result, Smyth’s embedded history and US information campaigns linked the mystique of a brave new scientific world to the discipline of physics even though physicists only do a fraction of the scientific work associated with any nuclear project. Viewed alongside Schwartz’s argument, Wellerstein’s book encourages us to reflect on the history of our discipline and on how people come to see some areas of knowledge as more valuable or fundamental than others.