Educational Media Reviews Online

In My Lifetime

2011
Distributed by The Video Project, PO Box 411376, San Francisco, CA 94141-1376; 800-475-2638
Produced by Robert E. Frye
Director n/a
DVD, color, 109 min.
College – General Adult
Cold War, Atomic Bombs, Nuclear Testing, World History

Reviewed by Andrew Jenks, California State University, Long Beach

  Highly Recommended

Date Entered: 8/3/2012

People often say we live in the “nuclear age,” but what that means is never entirely clear. This documentary captures the spirit, or rather spirits, of that era – from its beginnings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to the present. Inspired by the late Cold War, when Mikhail Gorbachev and Ronald Reagan initiated a process of disarmament in Iceland in 1986, the producer hopes to make viewers believe that eliminating nuclear weapons can happen – despite the growing fatalism and relative inattention to the problem in the post-Cold War era. Indeed, what seemed like a great opportunity for disarmament – the end of the Cold War – ushered in a new era of proliferation (North Korea and Pakistan ). And even as the real threat had arguably grown, the perception of that threat since the Cold War’s end paradoxically diminished. My own in-class surveys bear this out: I begin most of my classes by asking students how many fear the possibility of nuclear annihilation. In contrast to my own student experience in the early 1980s, when most of us periodically imagined the terrifying prospect of the mushroom cloud, few hands go up.  (read full review HERE)