Here are 100 books that Memoirs fans have personally recommended if you like
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By the time I was a high-school junior I knew I wanted to be a physicist. As a graduate student in 1950, as the Cold War was heating up, I joined the relatively small team that designed the first hydrogen bomb and got to work with some of the giants of 20th-century physics. It’s been a pleasure to read about this subject as well as to write about it.
Jeremy Bernstein is both an accomplished theoretical physicist and a skilled writer. He has published numerous scientific papers, written insightful articles in the New Yorker, and written many books that engagingly explain technical matters. He knew Robert Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study when Bernstein was a junior scholar there, and “Oppie” was the Institute’s Director.
It is an illuminating portrait, although not an in-depth biography. I know Bernstein as a fellow physicist and have served as a developmental editor on two of his books (although not this one).
As a former colleague of Oppenheimer's, Jeremy Bernstein has written a biographical profile that is both personal and historical, bringing the reader close to the life and workings of an extraordinary and controversial man. Without Oppenheimer's totally remarkable leadership at Los Alamos, the atomic bomb would not have happened, and World War II would have ended very differently. Bernstein, combining the grace of a New Yorker writer with the insight of a theoretical physicist, draws a fine and fascinating portrait. -Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
By the time I was a high-school junior I knew I wanted to be a physicist. As a graduate student in 1950, as the Cold War was heating up, I joined the relatively small team that designed the first hydrogen bomb and got to work with some of the giants of 20th-century physics. It’s been a pleasure to read about this subject as well as to write about it.
This follow-up to his definitive The Making of the Atomic Bomb covers it all—the people, the physics, and the politics. Richard Rhodes does his research, no question.
The book’s very breadth makes it less engrossing than some books with a narrower focus. Nevertheless, it’s a must for an “H-bomb library.”
Here, for the first time, in a brilliant, panoramic portrait by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is the definitive, often shocking story of the politics and the science behind the development of the hydrogen bomb and the birth of the Cold War.
Based on secret files in the United States and the former Soviet Union, this monumental work of history discloses how and why the United States decided to create the bomb that would dominate world politics for more than forty years.
By the time I was a high-school junior I knew I wanted to be a physicist. As a graduate student in 1950, as the Cold War was heating up, I joined the relatively small team that designed the first hydrogen bomb and got to work with some of the giants of 20th-century physics. It’s been a pleasure to read about this subject as well as to write about it.
Until 1939, plutonium, element number 93, was just a spot on the periodic table. Then, it became the core of the bomb tested at Alamogordo and of the bomb dropped on Nagasaki. It is not what provided most of the “yield” of the first H bomb, but it played an essential role in that device.
The skilled science writer Jeremy Bernstein examines the chemistry, physics, and history of plutonium.
When plutonium was first manufactured at Berkeley in the spring of 1941, there was so little of it that it was not visible to the naked eye. It took a year to accumulate enough so that one could actually see it. Now so much has been produced that we don't know what to do to get rid of it. We have created a monster.The history of plutonium is as strange as the element itself. When scientists began looking for it, they did so simply in the spirit of inquiry, not certain whether there were still spots to fill on the…
By the time I was a high-school junior I knew I wanted to be a physicist. As a graduate student in 1950, as the Cold War was heating up, I joined the relatively small team that designed the first hydrogen bomb and got to work with some of the giants of 20th-century physics. It’s been a pleasure to read about this subject as well as to write about it.
Working on the H bomb occupied only a small part of Fermi's long, productive career (and, accordingly, only a small part of this biography), but for a couple of years, it was an important part of his life, and he was an important contributor to its success.
Named a Best Book of the Year by Bloomberg (Chosen by Philip Tetlock), Booklist’s Top 10 Science Books of the Year, and Shortlisted for Physics World’s Book of the Year
A Major Biography of the Nobel Prize–Winning Physicist, Enrico Fermi, a Leading Architect of the Atomic Age
Enrico Fermi is unquestionably among the greats of the world’s physicists, the most famous Italian scientist since Galileo. Called “the Pope” by his peers, he was regarded as infallible in his instincts and research. His discoveries changed our world; they led to weapons of mass…
It was in 1982, while a Fulbright scholar in the USSR researching my doctoral dissertation, that I realized my responsibility as a historian extended far beyond writing history books. I lived among Russians and saw up close how the Kremlin-controlled what citizens knew about their own past. The future was already determined—the end of class struggle. The past was merely a made-up prologue. As a consequence of that year, I focus on the creation, preservation, and accessibility of cultural knowledge. History clues us into where we come from. Like a DNA test, it reveals how our single life is intricately braided with people we will never meet.
I wrote my books to reveal how a government’s lies about the present and past corrupts not only public life, but reaches deep into the psyches of individuals.
The correspondence between the physicist Heisenberg, working in secret on the atomic bomb (notoriously unsuccessfully), and his wife safe in Bavaria provides an intimate glimpse of how deeply the Nazi regime penetrated family life and challenged the natural love of one’s homeland.
Heisenberg and his wife were very much in love, devoted to each other and their children. They had a true and equal partnership. Readers can enjoy the sweet irony of knowing how the war turned out, something the participants could not know.
Instead, they were occupied with worries about food, money, the children’s health, sadly aware that things could never go back to how they were.
Personal letters reveal the quandary of a prominent German physicist during the Nazi years and the strength he shared with his loving wife
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg lived far from his wife, Elisabeth, during most of the Second World War. An eminent scientist, Werner headed Germany's national atomic research project in Berlin, while Elisabeth and their children lived more safely in Bavaria. This selection of more than 300 letters exchanged between husband and wife reveals the precarious nature of Werner's position in the Third Reich, Elisabeth's increasingly difficult everyday life as the war progressed, and the devoted relationship that…
I’ve been fascinated by epidemiology since I was a little kid first reading about the Black Death, and that interest only grew as I learned more about it over the years. Diving into the study of environmental history was especially fascinating for me, as I learned how under-emphasized the role of epidemics and pandemics has been in history, as if humans were trying to pretend that history was actually under our own control. This eventually culminated in me writing The Wrack, my own plague novel which, for better or worse, ended up coming out at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. (Slightly awkward timing, there.)
Aliens crash-land near a medieval European village during the Black Death, and establish friendly relations with the villagers- but Earth’s food lacks vital nutrients for them, and the plague creeps closer every day. Wonderful, heart-wrenching book about communities during times of crisis and disaster, and about the fundamental humanity that crisis brings out in us—even towards those who aren’t human.
The alien world of medieval Europe lives again, transformed by the physics of the future, by a winner of the Heinlein Award
Over the centuries, one small town in Germany has disappeared and never been resettled. Tom, a historian, and his theoretical physicist girlfriend Sharon, become interested. By all logic, the town should have survived. What's so special about Eifelheim?
Father Dietrich is the village priest of Eifelheim, in the year 1348, when the Black Death is gathering strength but is still not nearby. Dietrich is an educated man, and to his astonishment becomes the first contact person between humanity…
When I was in middle school, I’d spend much of my time in class daydreaming. Imagining myself in, say, a debate with someone I disagree with and going through a litany of scenarios where I’d try to convince that other person to change their mind. It’s a lot of fun. (My teachers would likely disagree.) When I grew older, I did more of that on my daily walks, and then about 11 years ago, I decided to start writing about creative ways to teach someone something they’re vehemently opposed to or just ambivalent about. I’ve published four books since then on this topic.
I read this book during my last year in college. I finished it in one day and figured there was no better personification for teaching in an unconventional way than the charismatic Richard Feynman.
I loved the story in one chapter about people attending his talks, being totally mesmerized, and then not being able to say what the lesson was about afterward. How we say something really is more important than what we say.
Richard P. Feynman, winner of the Nobel Prize in physics, thrived on outrageous adventures. In this lively work that "can shatter the stereotype of the stuffy scientist" (Detroit Free Press), Feynman recounts his experiences trading ideas on atomic physics with Einstein and cracking the uncrackable safes guarding the most deeply held nuclear secrets-and much more of an eyebrow-raising nature. In his stories, Feynman's life shines through in all its eccentric glory-a combustible mixture of high intelligence, unlimited curiosity, and raging chutzpah.
Included for this edition is a new introduction by Bill Gates.
I am the co-founder and current owner of The Manhattan Rare Book Company. I’ve been in the rare book business for 25 years, specializing in the history of science with particular emphasis on material relating to Albert Einstein. Like many people, I’ve long been drawn to Einstein, attracted by his wisdom, curiosity, personality, approachability, and general decency.
This is probably the book I study the most when researching Einstein. Although comprehensive in scope, it is still easy to navigate, with clear chapter headings that allow the reader to find information quickly. While many people hear the word "encyclopedia" and expect dry and dull prose, that is not the case here, for it is a book designed to be read, not merely consulted. Near the end of the book, there is a chronological list of Einstein's papers with concise descriptions. This is a gift to anyone interested in Einstein's scientific life, since the authors make even the most difficult of Einstein's papers seem approachable.
This is the single most complete guide to Albert Einstein's life and work for students, researchers, and browsers alike. Written by three leading Einstein scholars who draw on their combined wealth of expertise gained during their work on the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, this authoritative and accessible reference features more than one hundred entries and is divided into three parts covering the personal, scientific, and public spheres of Einstein's life. An Einstein Encyclopedia contains entries on Einstein's birth and death, family and romantic relationships, honors and awards, educational institutions where he studied and worked, citizenships and immigration to America,…
My dad was a Nobel Prize-winning particle physicist who co-discovered the muon neutrino, a particle whose existence was first explained by Fermi. I am not a physicist myself but grew up around physicists and have always been fascinated by them and was lucky to have met many of the great 20th century physicists myself – through my father. My family background enabled me to know these great scientists not only as scientists but as people.
Dirac was one of the creators of modern quantum physics. His theoretical contributions are astonishing in their insights and their power. He was, as the title says, a very strange man: painfully shy, laconic in the extreme, and socially awkward. He spoke so rarely that his colleagues at Cambridge used to joke that “a dirac” was a unit of measurement equal to one word an hour. Farmelo is a fine writer and gives a lay reader a deep understanding of why Dirac is considered such a giant in the field.
Paul Dirac was among the greatest scientific geniuses of the modern age. One of Einstein's most admired colleagues, he helped discover quantum mechanics, and his prediction of antimatter was one of the greatest triumphs in the history of physics. In 1933 he became the youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize in Physics. Dirac's personality, like his achievements, is legendary. The Strangest Man uses previously undiscovered archives to reveal the many facets of Dirac's brilliantly original mind.
A late bloomer—Ph.D. at 38, married at 39, father at 47—I struggled to “individuate,” torn between my rational nature, inherited from Dad, and my intuitive side from Mom. Serendipitously, in mid-life, I happened upon an extraordinary mentor, the late Quaker mystic John Yungblut. Through John, I encountered shining examples of those who successfully navigated the “struggle of the mystic,” among them the iconic psychoanalyst Carl Jung and the French paleontologist-priest Teilhard de Chardin. As I subsequently achieved some success at individuation, I came to see my struggle as symptomatic of broader tensions within Western society: the perennial conflict between science and religion. Reason and Wonder celebrates both modes of knowing.
Fleeing the Nazi Anschluss, Austrian quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger (famous for the wave equation and his eponymous cat) took refuge at Trinity College in Dublin. To thank his hosts, Schrödinger delivered a series of ground-breaking lectures in 1943, later published as What is Life?Schrödinger’s thought-provoking queries, originating from quantum mechanics, paved the way for the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953. After the war, in subsequent lectures published as Mind and Matter, Schrödinger tackled a deeper subject: the nature of consciousness.
Together, these classics are unparalleled in what they imply about life and its most remarkable attribute: sentience.
Troubling aspects of Schrödinger’s personal life make it tempting to exclude this work. Ultimately, it's crucial to separate the profound message from the messenger, who was deeply flawed.
Nobel laureate Erwin Schroedinger's What is Life? is one of the great science classics of the twentieth century. It was written for the layman, but proved to be one of the spurs to the birth of molecular biology and the subsequent discovery of DNA. What is Life? appears here together with Mind and Matter, his essay investigating a relationship which has eluded and puzzled philosophers since the earliest times. Brought together with these two classics are Schroedinger's autobiographical sketches, which offer a fascinating account of his life as a background to his scientific writings.
