About the book
Journalist and historian Richard Rhodes tells how the atomic bomb came to be, from the discoveries that led to nuclear fission through the Manhattan Project to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The narrative weaves together science, people and politics: Bohr, Fermi, Lawrence, Meitner, Oppenheimer, Szilard, Teller and von Neumann appear alongside Roosevelt and Einstein, and the story stretches from early hints in the writing of H.G. Wells to the Trinity test at Alamogordo and the Cold War arms race. Rhodes, whose only science training was a Yale course students called Physics for Poets, found the early papers in nuclear physics clearly written. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and the National Book Award.
Connect Ventures founder Bill Earner calls it his favorite book, praising how it covers the scientific advances, the personalities behind them and the political choices and escalating violence of the era.
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This book has 1 recommendation
Bill Earner (Founder/Connect Ventures)
My favorite book is The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. It's a book that covers a vast range of topics over a fifty year period. It talks about the scientific advances that led to the bomb, the personalities that made those advances, and at the same time covers the political choices and escalation of violence over the course of the first half of the 20th Century that paint the use of the atomic bomb on Japan as an almost inevitable conclusion of that escalation. The prose is as incredible as the story. It's really a treat to rea
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