Enter your mobile number or email address below and we'll send you a link to download the free Kindle App. Then you can start reading Kindle books on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.
Apple
Android
Windows Phone
Android
To get the free app, enter your mobile phone number.
This shopping feature will continue to load items. In order to navigate out of this carousel please use your heading shortcut key to navigate to the next or previous heading.
I will echo the other reviewers: this is one of the best, if not the best book I have read. The book covers the subect on a number of levels. First is the factual story of the events leading up to the making of the bomb, which in themselves would be fascinating. For example, the fact that in two years the Manhattan Project built an industrial plant larger than the US automobile manufacturing base. That only in December of 1938 was the fission of Uranium first discovered, but the course of events were so rapid as to lead to the Trinity test in July of 1945. As a sometime program manager, but no General Groves, it was a fascinating account of the world's most significant projecct. The second level is a very enjoyable history of nuclear physics as the reader is lead through the discovery process from the turn of the century to thermonuclear fusion. That discovery process is the vehicle for the third and fourth levels of the book. The stories and personalities of the scientists, around the world, who added to that knowledge, what shaped and motivated their lives and how they indiviually gained insight, brilliant insight, into the riddle that was physics. I felt I got to know people like Rutherford, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard, and Teller. The fourth level was that the insight was not really individual but collaborative. This book is one of the finest descriptions of the scientific process and how this open, collaborative and communicative process works across boundaries. The last level, the biggest surprise and the most profoundly unsettling, was the realization of how this event, inevitable, has "changed everything" about human history - an appreciation, I believe 55 years later, we who did not participate in the Manhattan Project, have yet to fully realize.Read more ›
6 Comments
261 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Everyone seeking to understand the 20th century, its history, its politics, its scientific development, must read this book. Not only does it illuminate one of the foundational events of our time far better than any other source, it definitively sets forth modern science, its ethical dilemmas, its odd combination of unbelievable explanatory power and the utterly (humanly) unfathomable reality science suggests. Rhodes traces the development of the atomic bomb to its scientific roots, which he demonstrates are inextricably intertwined with the people pushing the scientific developments at an ever increasing speed and for a long time had no idea of the potential their theories carried. Rhodes manages to do all this with complete lucidity, allowing the reader totally unfamiliar with quantum mechanics to follow along with reasonable comprehension. At the same time, the psychological, ethical and political dramas Rhodes describes make this the hands-down most thrilling, most exciting book I have ever read
4 Comments
160 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
One of the most admirable qualities of this truly marvelous work is its ability to paint the story of the creation of the first atomic weapon on the broadest possible canvas, reaching back into the bowels of history to trace, with the fidelity of a seismographic needle, the rise of both the specific intellectuals as well as the critical scientific mass to make the work not only conceivable, but possible. This is indeed a work that one reads repeatedly, for there is so much to digest within the pages of this masterwork as to defy any easy such description. So both the cast of involved personalities is long and incredibly interesting to witness as the author develops it, but then again, so is his description of the rise of theoretical physics through the work of Albert Einstein and his colleagues within the mostly European academic orbit in the first third of the twentieth century. In that sense, it is not strictly speaking, merely a detailed exposition dealing with what happened in New Mexico under incredibly secret circumstances during World War Two, as the Manhattan Project, even though it eventually gravitates toward being exactly that. Instead, the book opens as an exploration into the minds of some brilliantly eccentric professors and intellectuals struggling within theoretical physics on the very cutting edge of the unknown, and then stretching it in quite unsuspected and revolutionary ways. And as the critical mass of theoretical knowledge began to cluster within the fairly small community of like-minded souls, the scene changes based on world politics and the rise of fascism.Read more ›
Comment
64 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
As many have said, the amount of research that went into this book, and the resultant detail, was phenomenal.
I'm glad I bought and read the book. It gave me insights and understanding that I didn't have before hand, related to the scientific, social, and political elements of development of the bomb. At times it was so engaging, I had trouble putting it down.
I also enjoyed reading about the early history of atomic/nuclear research with Szilard, Rutherford, et. al. I had no idea beforehand of the massive undertaking needed to produce a workable bomb, and all the associated political problems.
Having said that, it was TOO MUCH WORK to read this book, for two main reasons:
1) Way too much detail on too many levels. For example, it seems like each time a new character was introduced there was anywhere from one to twenty pages background on this person, their family, their political and scientific past, etc. Kudos to the author for doing all this research but the net effect is that the central story kept losing steam each time we'd take one of these long detours into character building. I eventually found myself skipping dozens of pages at a time, trying to get back on track with the main topic. A good book must not stray too far from the main story or the average reader simply loses interest.
2) I found the sentence structure and language used to often be confusing. I had to re-read many sentences to understand what was being said. I'm not referring to the scientific sentences, which one might expect to be challenging for a non-scientist, but to the general prose.Read more ›
6 Comments
64 people found this helpful. Was this review helpful to you?
Yes No
Sending feedback...
Thank you for your feedback.
Sorry, we failed to record your vote. Please try again
Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway
This item: The Making of the Atomic Bomb: 25th Anniversary Edition
![]({"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51TkiyTaO2L._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg":[230,346],"https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/I/51TkiyTaO2L._SX329_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg":[331,499]})
