FROM HIROSHIMA TO THE MOON

From the cloak and dagger days of Oak Ridge to the rocket launching sites of today, a New Yorker staffer has covered the advent of the Atomic Age in a series of articles now collected in a highly readable book. Humorous moments of keeping ""The Bomb"" a secret way back when are balanced by the account of a visit to Hiroshima by Dr. Phillip Morrison, one of the bomb's makers. The former V-2 genius, Wernher von Braun is profiled. So are William G. Pollard who turned from physics to the pulpit; American soldiers fighting off rattlesnakes at White Sands Proving Grounds; illiterate Navajos who struck it rich with uranium; and so on. The dread possibilities of radioactive poisons are considered with a follow-up study of the girls who painted radium on watches forty years ago. Articles on rockets, flying saucers, and the AEC conclude this thorough, restrained yet deeply human book. It is a document on the men, machines and events which are drastically, perhaps fatally, changing our world.