85 books like Uncommon Sense

Published nineteen years before American Prometheus, this book also won a Pulitzer Prize.

A self-taught scientific writer, Rhodes is able to weave vivid character portrayals into the narrative of the science behind the bomb, turning a complex story into fascinating reading. Over several lunches with Patricia, Rhodes described Oppenheimer as someone who could antagonize and amuse at the same time.

She found the writer’s psychological  insights especially revealing. This is a book to be read and re-read.

A book that combines the intellectual firepower of possibly the best nuclear historian (Martin Sherwin) and biographer (Kai Bird) of their generation to produce something that is much more than the story of the “father of the nuclear bomb.”

As amazing as the film is, the book is a real thing of beauty. Juxtaposed with Ellsberg’s writings, what the book shows is just how much the architects of the nuclear era struggled with the moral implications of this reality.

As both a physicist and an established writer on scientific subjects, and having been at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton with Oppenheimer for two years, Jeremy Bernstein was perfectly positioned to write this book.

Combining history and personal observation, in the style of the profiles he wrote for New Yorker magazine, this book is imminently readable.

As the world slid into WWII, the German Werner Heisenberg was considered by other scientists to be the world’s greatest practicing physicist.

He was, in fact, a major reason that those at Los Alamos who knew him, believed that with Heisenberg leading an effort to produce an atom bomb, Germany might already be ahead in the race. And if they got there first, Hitler could very well win the war. As it turned out, there was no race, Germany’s effort was pathetic.

If Power’s attempt to acquit Heisenberg by suggesting he had deliberately held back is not quite successful, he does cover many different aspects of that time and struggle, from both sides.  It is possible to open at random this big fat book (it runs to 600 pages) and find oneself instantly absorbed in this early, eager, effort to tell the whole story. 

Published in 1965 and written by then Washington and foreign correspondent of Time Magazine Lamont, this book remains for me an exceptionally compelling narrative history.

The lens here is focused tightly on the events leading up to the first-ever test of an atomic bomb, which was codenamed “Trinity.” Obsessively researched, yes, but it’s Lamont’s writing that makes readers feel as though they are there, in the vastness of the desert, witnessing a happening that changed the world forever.

A novel about a young woman who worked on the atomic bomb and fell in love with one of the other scientists on the project who breaks her heart into a million pieces so she abandons her career and takes up as a shop-girl? Add in an FBI agent who is on the tail of the cad and wants her help in finding him? Count me in!

Fields is terrific at creating mood and the 1950s milieu. And the unexpected romance between Rosalind, the one-time scientist, and Charlie, the FBI agent, is both moving and immensely satisfying—these are two wounded souls who manage to find each other and by the end, you’re out of your chair and cheering.

I didn’t have the time or energy for this tome of a book on Harry Truman. Hence, I'd never have read it had it not been ‘assigned’ by the book club I was in.

But I was mesmerized from the first pages. And felt connected to this unobtrusive, somewhat unattractive man who was in every way ordinary. But who became the president during the last days of World War ll. A man who thought and spoke clearly. A man who seemed to personify the virtues without calling them that.

I learned a great deal from this book.

The author of this book was a Crossroads participant. Furthermore, the author’s father, Dr. Stafford L. Warren, was head of the Medical Section of the Manhattan Project; then headed up the postwar survey of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and was then appointed by the Navy to serve as Chief Radsafe (Radiologic Safety Section) at Crossroads. Mr. Dean Warren and I had several phone conversations before his passing and shared our respective health problems that may — or may not — have been caused by exposure to ionizing radiation at Crossroads.

This book is an unfinished work, hard to follow, because it is a draft never reviewed by the author and published posthumously.

However, it is a must-read, so please do not be discouraged as I was, for the ideas that it encloses picture a more equalized society practically based on the changing of our economic road, nothing else than ending capitalism as we know it.

Two subjects are of particular interest: first, how to correctly retribute people for the wealth they generate through their work; and second, a demonstration of how excess production and money amassing do not amount to wealth. An interesting lesson in economics.

The book was published in November 1946 by the U.S. Government, just months after Tests Able and Baker in July at the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands. Serious safety concerns about radiation contamination were coming to light and the book was withdrawn from circulation shortly after publication. In 1947, a re-write of the book was published and titled Bombs at Bikini: The Official Report of Operation Crossroads. This book had fewer photographs and of a less graphic nature. However, for my memoir as a Crossroads participant, I was glad to find a copy of the original out-of-print book for my research.