Fortunately, the members of a local Boy Scouts troop were urged by their parents and mentors to befriend the Japanese-American scouts interned in the camp. Later, Koppel learns that Japanese- Americans were relocated to a camp near Cody during World War II. There are Remington bronzes, and there is also a firearms museum. The Plains Indians insisted on organizing this part of the exhibition themselves, as they object to white people telling their stories for them. The original for the image is Simpson’s older brother. There is a holographic image of Buffalo Bill welcoming visitors. They meet (though Koppel had hoped to sleep later).
When, for example, Koppel travels to Cody, Wyo., to interview preppers, he begins by telling us how Alan Simpson, a former Wyoming senator, woke him up on a Saturday morning and invited him to meet in front of the city’s Buffalo Bill Center. The concept is admirable, the execution something else. That is, he wants to mesh the journalistic process through which he learns about these truths with an exposition of his book’s larger themes and ideas. Koppel wants to tell this story as a journalist rather than as an analyst. To his credit, Koppel has chosen a complex and ambitious array of subjects: He looks at the danger of a major disaster caused by a long-term collapse in the electric grids on which we all rely, warns that the government agencies charged with protecting us from such catastrophes are in all likelihood woefully unprepared and takes us into the world of the “preppers” (people amassing supplies and building shelters so that they can survive such a collapse). Sloppy, self-indulgent and discursive, this is a book that winds around its subject, wanders off on unenlightening tangents, includes unnecessary anecdotes about the narrator’s uninteresting exploits in quest of the story and never really gets to the point. The combination of a sober establishment journalist looking into the heart of a national nightmare, warning us that our worst fears are better grounded than we think and taking us to visit people who are preparing their shelters against the prospect of a catastrophe that destroys modern civilization should be gripping to read. In “Lights Out: A Cyberattack, a Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath,” Ted Koppel, one of America’s most experienced and best-known journalists, has attempted to show readers why the danger is real, the degree to which the authorities are unprepared and the steps we can take now to be ready when the power goes down. The possibility that terrorists or a hostile foreign state could take down the American power grid either by a cyberattack or by an electromagnetic pulse attack is one of those haunting possibilities that keep strategic planners from sleeping peacefully at night.
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