This is a really fantastic book I wanted to bring to more people’s attention: http://www.amazon.com/The-Making-Atomic-Bomb-Anniversary/dp/1451677618
I wrote a full review on my blog: The Making of the Atomic Bomb | Firelink Shrine
I was wondering if anyone had any recommendations on books with a similar focus on both science and history?
Joel
His followup, Dark Sun, continues the story with the development of the hydrogen bomb, and does just as good a job even though much of that story is (or was then) still much more highly classified.
I regard Making as a book so well-written in every respect and so important that I don’t think anyone should talk about nuclear weapons in public without having read it.
One of my favorite pop-sci books. The obvious recommendation would be the sequel “Dark Sun”. Goes through the development of the H-Bomb in a similar way, along with a history of the early cold war and nuclear espionage.
(reported for forumn change).
There’s an entire universe of books on science and history. Here are a few:
Rats, Lice, and History – Hans Zinsser. Published in 1935, but definitely worth reading. A very offbeat “biograhy” of thyphus.
The Great Arc – The Dramatic Tale of how India was Mapped and Everest was Named by John Keay. Published in 2000, it tells the story of how an arc of meridian was accurately measured, step by step, using chain measures and theodolites across the length of india by laying it out in near-equilateral triangles. They eventually covered a lot of India with such lines, getting the most accurate measure of distance and earth’s curvature at the time. Everest was involved for a large part of it, which is why the mountain bears his name. It’s also the set of measurements that produced the story you may have heard about the mass of the Himalayas attracting the plumb bob by their distortion of gravity, throwing off the vertical measurement. Also, it’s not even in the book, but this series of measurements inspired one of Jules Verne’s earliest novels, Meridiana, where he has a Russo-British team performing the same set of measurements across Africa.
A Thread Across the Ocean – The Heroic Story of the Transatlantic Cable by John Steele Gordon – the story of the frequently-frustrating efforts to link not only the two sides of the Atlantic, but also stretches on either side of the Atlantic separated by bays and seas. Cables frequently broke while being laid down, or failed after only a few months of service.
Moved from IMHO to Cafe Society.
The Rhodes’ book is one of my favorites. I frequently re-tell the story about how it was not the scientists who figured out how to make it a practical weapon, but a military guy attached to the project:
[spoiler]When they decided on a gun-type uranium bomb, they contacted the Navy Ordnance Labratory and were told that they did indeed have a gun (more of an artillery piece) with the required muzzle velocity. Unfortunately, it was way too heavy to be lifted by any airplane and would never fit in a bomb bay in any case. So they went back to the drawing board.
It wasn’t Fermi, Teller or Oppenheimer who had the key insight. The military guy supposedly sat up in bed one night and realized that the only reason the gun was that big and beefy was because it was designed to be fired repeatedly. If you’re going to use it to set off an atomic bomb, it only needed to fire once and could be stripped down considerably. That became the Little Boy. [/spoiler]
As for a recommendation of something similar, my first thought is A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin. It’s the definitive account of the Apollo astronauts’ lunar missions. Perhaps not quite so heavy on the science as Rhodes, but similar. It’s a fantastic book and I vividly remember my excitement the first time I read it.
I’ll definitely take a look at them!
More history than science, but I found Simon Winchester’s Kratatoa to be an absolutely absorbing and enlightening read. For one thing, it explains why such a large swath of SE Asia is Muslim. (In very, very short, the historical predecessor of the Red Crescent came in to succor, save and convert the hundreds of thousands of islanders affected by the disaster after the European colonizers failed to do so.)
I love the OP’s book. Brilliant.
There’s plenty to recommend. I’ll start with Justinian’s Flea - it’s a history covering events leading up to and through Justinian’s reign - reforming the empire, only to lose it in part due to plague. Lots of science around architectutpre (building the Hagia Sophia), epidemiology (plague), warfare (Bellisarius’s campaigns on behalf of J) and other good stuff. I didn’t know a lot about the period and enjoyed it.
I really enjoyed this book: Atomic America : how a deadly explosion and a feared admiral changed the course of nuclear history by Todd Tucker. I was raised in Idaho Falls but knew little of Idaho Nuclear Engineering Laboratories, even though my father worked there for most of his career. I visited his workplace exactly once in the 18 years he was at “the site,” as everyone in Idaho Falls called INEL. My father worked on the nuclear powered bomber they were developing (family lore has it that he was scheduled to be the reactor operator on the first flight) and later did cleanup on the army reactor that exploded there. There is a whole chapter on an army base under the glacier ice of Greenland that I knew nothing about. A fascinating book from start to finish.
Heisenberg’s War by Thomas Powers IMO does a good job combining history and science even though
its treatment of the German scientists, especially the title namesake, has been criticized as too lenient.
I do not believe this explanation is correct. Islam was firmly established and widely dominant in SE Asia
centuries before the Krakatoa eruption.
I liked this book, too, but, as I said when we discussed it earlier on this Board, I wish there’d been more description of the event itself and the immediate aftermath. There’s an awful lot of background and buildup, but not enough of the actual event. I realize that it was a devastating event, but there must be moree available.
I like Winchester’s books on the Oxford English Dictionary more. And his book on the Black Death.
Blind Man’s Bluff - Fascinating history of American Submarines, especially during the cold war. Was suggested to me by multiple submariners.
That may be so, but I recall Winchester making a very solid case that the dominance of Islam in the region traces to the aftermath of Krakatoa.
Hmm. I don’t remember that being scanty - he talked about everything that occurred in those few hours, in depth, as I recall. I need to reread it anyway.
Seconded.
Loved TMOTAB. I wasn’t aware of Dark Sun, but since I’ll be sitting on a beach for a week in the near future, I think it’ll go with me.
I liked “The Last Man on the Moon” by Eugene Cernan.
I’ll recommend two books by Dava Sobell, Galileo’s Daughter and Longitude.
The former is a brilliant biography based on the letters Sister Marie Celeste wrote to her famous father over the course of her short life. (She chose her nun’s name to reflect Galileo’s interest in astronomy.) I think Galileo is one of the most important and influential men in history, and this very well written book depicts his devotion to science, his sincere belief in God, and his daughter’s love and concern for his well being as he becomes embroiled in the famous controversy with the Roman Catholic church.
If reading about Galileo inspires you as it did me, you should consider reading his works. Unlike most original scientific texts, by say, Newton, or other early scientists, Galileo’s were written for ordinary readers, not other scientists. Most are in the form of dialogs and include drama and humor and are generally very readable.
You might also consider reading the complete letters from Sister Marie Celeste, which Sobel translated and published in a separate volume. Marie Celeste, one of several illegitimate children Galileo fathered, was the only one he considered his intellectual equal, although she remained in a very poor monastery from age 16 until her death at age 34. Her letters are very touching, and I often found myself in tears while reading them. (Sadly, Galileo’s letters to her have been lost.)
Longitude is a fascinating look for the search, in the 18th century, for a method for determining a ship’s east-west position at sea. The problem was so important that the British government offered a prize of £20,000 (more than $4 million today) for its solution. Clocks of the day were not accurate enough even when stationary on dry land, and would barely function at all on the rolling deck of a ship at sea. Other methods were proposed, some merely impractical (ships anchored a few miles apart all the way across the ocean that would announce the time every hour by firing a cannon when they heard the shot from the one to their east that ultimately originated from land) to the truly bizarre (a wounded dog on a ship would supposedly yelp when its bandage was dipped in a magic powder on shore – see Powder of sympathy).
John Harrison, a provincial clockmaker, did what no scientist of the day – including Edmund Halley (of comet fame) – thought possible: build a clock that would remain accurate to within a second a month, even aboard a ship. He actually built four clocks over about 40 years and had to fight the scientific establishment to obtain the recognition and prize he deserved. And that only happened (in part) thanks to the intervention of the King.
It’s an amazing story, and it is mind boggling to realize, in these days when every phone can tell you precisely where you are and what time it was, what life was like when no one knew what time it was and small navigation errors could lead to the deaths of thousands of sailors.
commasense - I agree with you about Sobel’s books. Longitude is end-to-end solid. Galileo’s Daughter is great as an overview of Galileo and his time - anchoring the book with the father-daughter relationship felt a bit forced, but that’s a quibble.
She also wrote a book about Copernicus - not so good. Historically interesting, but she built it around a play/scenes she wrote imagining some events we don’t have records on. Not so great, IMHO.
I forgot to recommend the Illustrated Longitude, a luscious edition of Sobel’s book that includes wonderful color pictures of the various clocks and things.
As it happens, I have autographed first editions of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Galileo’s Daughter. I met Rhodes at a lecture he gave in Washington, DC.
Then I had dinner with Sobel at a conference at which she spoke a few years ago. I am so fond of those books that it was hard to avoid gushing, but she was so gracious and appreciative of my admiration that she gave me (and autographed) a paperback copy of Longitude she happened to have, then signed a hardbound copy of Galileo’s Daughter I mailed her later.
Very cool; I have a first of Longitude; good to hear she’s nice. I covet your signed Rhodes 
I have a first of Simon Winchester’s The Professor & The Madman - actually first released in the UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne…