A welcome addition to the literature of the atomic age.
A well considered portrait of the scientists who made the atomic bomb and then repented ever after.
Although thousands of scientists and support staff contributed to the development of the Trinity bomb and its cousins, writes VanDeMark (History/US Naval Academy), nine “contributed centrally to the bomb’s creation” and just as quickly raised objections, on a variety of grounds, to its employment. These scientists, VanDeMark suggests, can be forgiven—if forgiveness is desired—for their initial enthusiasm for the work: after all, caught up in “the frenzy of creation,” they were just doing what scientists do, pursuing knowledge for its own sake; one of them, Edward Teller, argued, “As a scientist, it is my responsibility to make things that will work. How they’re used is not my responsibility.” However, many of Teller’s colleagues disagreed even before the bomb was deployed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some, like Leo Szilard, argued that it should not be used at all, for to do so would “open the door to an era of devastation on an unimaginable scale”; others, like Robert Oppenheimer, maintained that it should be used only at night, when it would light up the night sky and force an immediate surrender in its awful glow. (VanDeMark reveals that the military elected a daylight raid to protect the bomber crews from danger, even if it removed the shock-and-awe element.) Though less well written than Richard Rhodes’s Making of the Atomic Bomb, VanDeMark’s study does a good job of exploring the culture of science, especially the science involved in making weapons and the moral dilemmas such work occasions. As if to validate its subjects’ fears, this closes with a dark warning that the continuing spread of nuclear weapons today puts the lie to previous assurances that the doctrine of deterrence “can work everywhere and forever.”
A welcome addition to the literature of the atomic age.Pub Date: June 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-316-73833-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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