The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians
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Book Summary Information
Editor: Cynthia C. KellyIntroduction: Richard Rhodes
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-02-10
ISBN: 1579128084
Number of pages: 496
Publisher: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers
Book Reviews of The Manhattan Project: The Birth of the Atomic Bomb in the Words of Its Creators, Eyewitnesses, and Historians
Book Review: An excellent companion-book for Rhodes' masterful "Making of..."
Summary: 4 Stars
The first stop for anyone wanting to learn about the Manhattan Project is (and quite possibly always will be) Richard Rhodes' Pulitzer-winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb. For most people, that tome will completely sate their curiosity.
For the insatiable minority that remains, this book is marvellous. Anyone thinking of writing a book with a title like this has to avoid duplicating the work of Mr. Rhodes. Cynthia Kelly simply presents some of the original source material, stitched together with a minimum of analysis, and with an introduction added by Rhodes himself.
It's also a complement to the excellent documentary The Day After Trinity. One of the main narrators in the video, Robert Serber, describes their hilariously-futile attempts to sow disinformation around the gin goints of Santa Fe. In the book here we get the same story told from his wife's viewpoint, to great effect.
The book doesn't use rose-coloured glasses: it adequately covers the rather shoddy treatment of Oppenheimer after the war, but it does skimp on some areas that I would like to see more about, like Oppenheimer's rather shoddy treatment of his one-time friend Haakon Chevalier. And it also spends exactly two pages going into one of the few areas of the whole story that perhaps still deserves a volume to itself: the very long delay between Einstein's letter to FDR explaining that the Germans were probably working on an atomic bomb (August 1939), and Vannevar Bush's letter to FDR announcing the Project finally at "full speed" (March 1942). Eugene Wigner describes the early days of the project as like "swimming in syrup." Leo Szilard estimates that unnecessary delays delayed the project for at least a year. Imagine how much pain, suffering and death might have been avoided, and how different the world might be today if Little Boy, instead of being ready to drop on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, had instead been ready to drop exactly fourteen months earlier, on June 6, 1944.
But the material the book does include is first-rate. My likely next stop after this is Now It Can Be Told - the same story from the viewpoint of "the biggest S.O.B. who ever lived", Leslie Groves.
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