Richard Rhodes (1) (1937–)

Have you ever walked across really, really hot sand in your bare feet? There you are, stinging and ouching all the way across the incredibly hot terrain. But! It's a pain you don't want to give up because of where you are and where you going. Your destination is that blissful blanket by the sea and it will be lovely (why else are you there?). You know the pain will only last as long as you as are hot-stepping across the sand. That brief agony is the way I felt about Hole in the World by show more Richard Rhodes. It was unpleasant reading, even hurtful reading but I couldn't put it down. I wanted to get to the good part, that blanket, if you will. It's the story of Richard Rhodes growing up in an abusive household. I know he heals from his traumatic childhood. I know the abuses he suffered didn't last forever. There is light at the end of the dark tunnel of boyhood. But, it is a book worth reading. His words haunted my heart long after I put it down. show less

This is a powerful, deeply affecting book. Its 800 pages are dense, and require much of the reader. But the return is a comprehensive account of the development of the atomic bomb: the nuclear physics of the first decades of 20th century that made the effort possible; the historical context that led to its construction; the scientific collaboration at Los Alamos and how the feat was accomplished. In a forceful closing, Rhodes offers an astute evaluation of the results, implications and show more challenges the bomb brought to the world.
Many books fail to stand the test of time; here the three decades since its publication have only affirmed its centrality in telling the story of the atomic bomb. Rhodes had access to some of the key figures in the making of the bomb who were then still alive, which supplemented his exceptional talent for writing history and the history of science. And to the reader’s good fortune, Rhodes happens to be an impeccable prose stylist. The book justly received the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award.
As a reader of the history of science, I was firmly in the grip of Rhodes’ delivery of the familiar but still electrifying story of nuclear physics from the early discovery of xrays and radioactivity (Röntgen, Becquerel, Curie) at the end of the 19th century through its culmination in Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner’s discovery of nuclear fission. While told in meticulous detail, this long section reads like a scientific thriller.
Any serious account of the making of the atomic bomb must contend with the responses of the scientists to the consequences of their work. Three figures central to the intellectual underpinnings of the Manhattan Project cast a giant moral shadow over this story. Leo Szilard is well known for his letter co-written with Einstein to FDR informing him of the feasibility of a bomb, and warning of the possibility of a German nuclear effort. He was also the man who developed the idea that connected nuclear fission to a bomb: the nuclear chain reaction. And yet as the bomb neared completion, Szilard exhausted himself in trying to encourage the United States not to use it. Robert Oppenheimer, brilliant director of the Manhattan Project, is seen after his greatest success to labor under the impossible burden of having brought such destructive power into the world. Finally, Neils Bohr, among the greatest and most influential of scientists, is shown as the conscience of his peers. Bohr used his authority to present to the Allied leaders his concept of the complementarity represented by the bomb. In this he meant that the destructiveness of the weapon contained an inherent opposite – that the power of the bomb necessitated fundamental changes in political arrangements, and in fact required us to put an end to war. The alternative was an arms race leading to the unthinkable.
Rhodes ultimately puts the atomic bomb into its most important human context: with Bohr’s notion of its complementarity, comes the imperative to face the fundamental changes wrought by nuclear technology. He argues that the modern nation-state has appropriated the power of science and fashioned out of it a death machine. He sees citizens “slowly come to understand that in a nuclear world their national leaders cannot, no matter how much tribute and control they exact, protect even their citizens’ bare lives, the minimum demand the commons have made in exchange for the political authority that is ultimately theirs alone to award.” Our minimal protection is the mere hope of the restraint of others similarly armed. Seventy years after Hiroshima, thirty years after the publication of this book, are we any closer to addressing the imperatives thrust upon us?
In 1946, Einstein famously warned “The splitting of the atom changed everything save man’s mode of thinking, thus we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.” Einstein was right about so many things. Let us hope that this too will not prove to be one of them. show less

Rhodes has penned an engaging and inspiring biography of the astonishing life of John James Audubon, naturalist, artist and author of Birds of America, the enormous and staggeringly gorgeous book of which first editions today sell at auction for upwards of $10 million. Audubon's passionate and single-minded obsession with painting North American birds, frequently forsaking financial stability, relationships with family and friends, and even hygiene in pursuit of his life's work, is show more reminiscent of Michelangelo in The Agony and the Ecstasy. The book reads like an absorbing adventure, but there are a number of sobering passages, among them Audubon coming to the (accurate, as it turns out) realization that the wild state of nature he was presently observing in the United States would be greatly diminished within a century. And like Meriwether Lewis, who famously lamented on his birthday as having contributed very little to human knowledge (this, while in the midst of the Lewis & Clark Expedition), Audubon rather heartbreakingly frets that he hasn't really accomplished much of anything, despite having produced hundreds of magnificent paintings. Lucy Audubon, whom Audubon abandoned for years at a time chasing publication of his paintings, was truly a saint. show less

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5653048601

When I finished reading through the final chapter’s last pages, I wondered: what’s the most important book ever written? I did a quick Google and found that all the suggested lists used the word “influential” instead, not what I wanted. I put quotes around the query and was not too pleased to find a bunch of christian websites using SEO to convince Google to serve an answer: the Bible.

I’m not going to suggest that The Making of the show more Atomic Bomb is the most important book ever written. I think it’s up on the list, in the top quarter, at least. It is probably one of the most important books I’ve read. Many Americans know a vague sketch of the Manhattan Project; I expect very few could trace its history back to Leo Szilard reading Ernest Rutherford calling the idea of liberating atomic energy “moonshine.”

The book is a tome, and there’s no way around it. Some readers will think the history too far-flung, too detailed, and too long. I scratched my head through passages of the book and had to read and reread a few of them. Yet, this is a literary work of high quality. The whole book is a gentle but consistently rising crescendo.

The final two chapters - Trinity and Tongues of Fire - are astounding. It may be the best non-fiction writing I have had the pleasure and discomfort of reading. In Trinity, Rhodes walks us on a nearly second-by-second countdown to the terrible culmination of centuries of scientific work. Tongues of Flame elevates numerous accounts of survivors from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, deploying language to try and communicate the incommunicable.

There are so many roads one could go down following this. I found Colonel Stimson compelling. I’ve known the tale of his removal of Kyoto from the list of targets for a long, long time - but I always understood the reasoning as little more than his honeymooning there (a tale the movie OPPENHEIMER recounts). This book paints a much more nuanced view of Stimson as someone horrified by the bomb (and horrified by the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo) and as a statesman straddling generations and losing purchase in an evolving world.

It took me a long time to get through this book, but I’m glad I did. Astounding. show less