Waterstones The Making Of The Atomic Bomb
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Price: £16.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE The Making of the Atomic Bomb is the seminal and complete story of how the bomb was developed, from the turn-of-the-century discovery of the vast energy locked inside the atom to the dropping of the first bombs on Japan. Few great discoveries have evolved so swiftly - or have been so misunderstood. From the theoretical discussions of nuclear energy to the bright glare of Trinity, there was a span of hardly more than twenty-five years. What began as merely an interesting speculative problem in physics grew into the Manhattan Project, and then into the bomb, with frightening rapidity, while scientists known only to their peers - Szilard, Teller, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Meitner, Fermi, Lawrence and von Neumann - stepped from their ivory towers into the limelight. Richard Rhodes gives the definitive story of man's most awesome discovery and invention. Told in rich human, political and scientific detail, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a narrative tour de force and a document with literary power commensurate with its subject. . Waterstones The Making Of The Atomic Bomb - shop the best deal online on thebookbug.co.uk
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781471111235
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9781471111235
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Author: Richieparf
Rating: 5
Review: It would have been easy for RIchard Rhodes to write an easygoing, mass-market, 300-page history of the Atomic Bomb. Starting with the Manhattan Project, glossing over the science and skipping ahead to the tests and then dropping the two bombs on Japan, it would be a quick read and a popular book. Rhodes doesn't do that, and his readers are much better off for it. In The Making of the Atomic Bomb, instead, he provides a detailed account of the different threads that led to the creation of the bomb. He talks about the scientists who created the bomb and their journeys from (largely) central and eastern Europe to (eventually) Los Alamos in the United States. Anti-semitism, Nazism, and War drove them westwards, while their own curiosity and the global, cooperative Republic of knowledge gives them the tools to make the bomb. Rhodes is both detailed and accessible with the science. He trusts the reader to understand what's going on, and he does a good job of helping the reader to navigate the neutrons and the alpha particles and work their way to a place where the difference between U238 and U235 feels easy and natural. The politics is very much the third narrative, given less prominence than the science or the scientists, but nonetheless Rhodes gives it all due attention. The major players, Roosevelt and Churchill especially, and the various go betweens that connected their governments with the scientists, are all present in the narrative. The Second World War itself is obviously vital, and Rhodes returns to it periodically to aid understanding of the urgency and priorities driving the project. On the bomb's eventual use, he allows witness testimony to do most of the talking. The accounts from Hiroshima and Nagasaki are horrifying, and the statistics on the number of dead and injured are unfathomable. Rhodes covers the debate among the scientists about how the post-Atomic world of weaponry should be managed (international control, treaties etc) and suggests, perhaps optimistically, that the Cold War standoff might have been avoided if information had been shared more openly at an earlier stage. In any case, the reader cannot help but be fascinated and informed by this monumental work. Highly recommended.
Author: Andy
Rating: 4
Review: This is the definitive history not just of the Atom Bomb but of all the physic of fissionable elements over the previous 100 years that led to it. It is very thorough, perhaps even a bit too thorough in places. But it always remains readable and you get a very good sense of how lots of physicists were really feeling their way towards understanding fission in the 1930s & 1940s. It is also excellent at giving a balanced view of world events - both the Nazis and the Japanese were doing their own research. If Hitler had got there first and used the bomb maybe we'd all be part of the Greater Nazi German Empire now... It doesn't bear thinking about. My other complaint is that the paperback book is physically too big & heavy (at 838 pages) to be easily read when on public transport, in the bath etc. I actually cut mine in two with a sharp knife and now it's much better. It should have been sold in 2 volumes for ease of reading. Maybe the hardback was, I don't know...
