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falcone9's review against another edition
5.0
Simply the most fascinating boring book I've ever read.
qls's review
5.0
incredibly dense yet extraordinarily compelling storytelling. rhodes chronicles the conception, creation and construction of the bomb through the lens of physics, warfare, politics and philosophy. equally awe-inspiring and horrifying, the bomb is at times seen as an opportunity to rid the world of war, but ultimately becomes the perfectly inhumane reflection of mankind’s drive towards a new kind of total war.
honestly one of the best books i’ve ever read.
honestly one of the best books i’ve ever read.
julcoh's review
5.0
Exceptional and exceptionally dense. I read this leading up to Christopher Nolan’s 2023 Oppenheimer film but now have all of Rhodes’ other nonfiction works on my reading list.
It is truly exhaustive and exhaustively researched. Rhodes takes us through the enormous scope of fundamental physics research in the early twentieth century and the Manhattan Project through the end of WWII. He starts off the book noting that the history of early atomic physics is primarily one of practical experimentation (built on top of startling theoretical work), quite simple in hypothesis and procedure though hugely difficult in execution, and that understanding the history through that practical lens makes it quite graspable to the layperson. As a mechanical engineer I’ve studied a fair amount of physics, though my expertise stops well short of atomic and quantum theory, and I’m a keen fan of the history of science— even so, I found Rhodes’ writing riveting and enlightening without becoming a slog.
I was quite surprised at the extent to which this book nominally on the atomic bomb is really a biographical work about the few dozen scientists whose work ultimately created the atomic age. Even at the height of WWII R&D there were only a few hundred people globally who really understood the science. How is it that a preponderance of these scientists were Jewish? How is it that so many future Nobel laureates came from one specific region of poor rural shtetls in Hungary? How did these men (and they were, almost though not entirely, all men) come to grasp such a long lever on humanity’s future?
This is one of those books that I enjoyed every minute reading, though there were MANY MINUTES. It is a large and long and dense read.
I think this is objectively a five star book, but it hit me particularly hard in this time and place in my life— in the uproar of Oppenheimer, and my own search for how to point my professional efforts amidst the incredible gravitational pull of defense industry funding in my field of advanced manufacturing.
It is truly exhaustive and exhaustively researched. Rhodes takes us through the enormous scope of fundamental physics research in the early twentieth century and the Manhattan Project through the end of WWII. He starts off the book noting that the history of early atomic physics is primarily one of practical experimentation (built on top of startling theoretical work), quite simple in hypothesis and procedure though hugely difficult in execution, and that understanding the history through that practical lens makes it quite graspable to the layperson. As a mechanical engineer I’ve studied a fair amount of physics, though my expertise stops well short of atomic and quantum theory, and I’m a keen fan of the history of science— even so, I found Rhodes’ writing riveting and enlightening without becoming a slog.
I was quite surprised at the extent to which this book nominally on the atomic bomb is really a biographical work about the few dozen scientists whose work ultimately created the atomic age. Even at the height of WWII R&D there were only a few hundred people globally who really understood the science. How is it that a preponderance of these scientists were Jewish? How is it that so many future Nobel laureates came from one specific region of poor rural shtetls in Hungary? How did these men (and they were, almost though not entirely, all men) come to grasp such a long lever on humanity’s future?
This is one of those books that I enjoyed every minute reading, though there were MANY MINUTES. It is a large and long and dense read.
I think this is objectively a five star book, but it hit me particularly hard in this time and place in my life— in the uproar of Oppenheimer, and my own search for how to point my professional efforts amidst the incredible gravitational pull of defense industry funding in my field of advanced manufacturing.
haligon_ian's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
medium-paced
5.0