The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Rhodes's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Manhattan Project is simultaneously the best science history and the best war history ever written. He follows both the physics and the human beings who created the weapon with equal mastery, resulting in a book about the most important scientific achievement in history.
The early chapters are overloaded with physicists to track before the Manhattan Project starts, and the pure-physics passages read “almost a technical manual”; to one reader “this felt like a theoretical physics textbook,” and stretches “verge into the realm of unreadably esoteric.” Several say it is too complete for its own good, “very TMI about everything and everybody,” working better as a reference to dip into than a book to read through. Nine hundred pages and thirty-seven hours on audio. A critic charges that Rhodes “neglects analysis, sometimes sacrifices the important to the vivid.” And it stops soon after the surrender, leaving readers with “A LOT more interest” in what became of the physicists.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
