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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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