If the first 270 pages of this book had been published separately,
they would have made up a lively, insightful, beautifully written
history of theoretical physics and the men and women who plumbed
the mysteries of the atom. Along with the following 600 pages,
they become a sweeping epic, filled with terror and pity, of the
ultimate scientific quest: the development of the ultimate weapon.
Rhodes is a peerless explainer of difficult concepts; he is even
better at chronicling the personalities who made the discoveries
that led to the Bomb. Niels Bohr dominates the first half of
the book as J. Robert Oppenheimer does the second; both men were
gifted philosophers of science as well as brilliant physicists.
The central irony of this book, which won a National Book Critics
Circle Award, is that the greatest minds of the century contributed
to the greatest destructive force in history.

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