The book appears to be up to date to early 1991. It is clearly written by
a "believer" in "cold fusion"; this is stated bluntly in the Preface and again
and again in the text. Nevertheless, the book gives fair coverage to the
skeptics' complaints and is well written. Mallove is both a professional
writer and a scientist, and goes into some technical detail in places. He
rightly argues against the facile dismissal of cold fusion by the "experts",
who often use simplistic approaches and prove nothing. He believes that there
is now a mass of evidence for both excess heat and emission of neutrons and
tritium; the emissions are arguable but the excess heat observed by several
apparently competent groups is indeed hard to explain away. The book gives a
time-sequence of the story, and also deals with the prehistory of cold fusion,
i.e. the 1926-7 papers of Paneth et al, the Swedish (Tandberg) work of the
'thirties, and muon catalysed fusion (the original "cold fusion"). The related
field of cluster impact fusion is covered. Fractofusion is not, apart from a
single paragraph (quoting a US expert), and the Soviet workers do not appear
in the book at all.
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