A lively, if sprawling, history of the atomic era

Abstract

Craig Nelson, the author of this unflaggingly engrossing book, comes from an impressive background in publishing, having been vice president and executive editor of Harper and Row, Hyperion, and Random House. In this respect, he reminds me of the better known Walter Isaacson, who was managing editor of Time magazine before turning his attention to writing biographies of Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Ben Franklin, and, most recently, a collective biography of the pioneers of the digital revolution. Although I reach this conclusion on the basis of having read only one book by each, I would say that Isaacson’s oeuvre is more scholarly, Nelson’s more journalistic. A review in the New York Times of Nelson’s bestseller Rocket Men informs would-be readers that while the book ‘‘lacks the shapeliness and authority of some earlier lunar histories,...it ends up making an engaging contribution.’’ Comparing The Age of Radiance to the many similar histories of radioactivity and the making of the bomb that I have read (several of which I have reviewed over the past decade for Metascience, along with biographies of some of the scientists profiled in Nelson’s book), I could say much the same thing. The canvas Nelson paints is sprawling, and, in covering so much ground, the author occasionally, if only briefly, appears to lose focus. His breezy style may also undermine his authoritativeness for some readers. As a biographer of Marie Curie, I was initially taken aback at the end of Chapter 1 by Nelson’s calling her ‘‘one hell of a broad.’’ But I soon became accustomed to his modus operandi, and I not only enjoyed reading the book but also learned many interesting facts from it (albeit some more important than others). Although Nelson divides the book into four parts, the first two comprise a slightly longer (and to me more interesting) section, taking us from the discovery of X-rays to the development of the atomic bomb and the detonations of Little Man and Fat Boy over Japan. The slightly shorter but more rambling Parts Three and Four focus