The devil reached toward the sky An oral history of the making & unleashing of the atomic bomb

Journalist Graff (When the Sea Came Alive) delivers a magisterial oral history of the atomic bomb. The book opens by tracing enigmatic statements about the atom from the ancient Greeks to Isaac Newton ("No ordinary power divide what God himself made") before getting to the 20th century, at which point the mysteries of the atomic world begin to crash into the brutalities of the political one (German physicist Werner Heisenberg: "A young man pressed a red handbill into my hand, warning me" that Jewish scientist Albert Einstein's modern physics was "entirely alien to the German spirit"). Soon Einstein writes his fateful letter to Franklin Roosevelt, warning him of "extremely powerful bombs of a new type," and Roosevelt approves a special project devoted to such a bomb's creation. (One administrator notes this as a remarkable leap of faith, given that the project "could only be tested at full-scale" and was based on nothing but "some figures on a piece of paper.") Graff collates fascinating details about life at Los Alamos, where families, whose identities were shrouded in secrecy, were known by Army personnel as simply "the creeps." When the first bomb is dropped on Hiroshima, Graff conveys both the monumental nature of the task and the incomprehensible horror it wrought ("I felt colors. It wasn't heat"; "I felt I was throwing up my internal organs"). The result is a stunning account that brings to the fore the nuclear saga's surreal combination of ingenuity, fate, and terror. (Aug.)

The human stories behind the atomic bomb. With a scope never seen before or since, the Manhattan Project--to develop and build the first nuclear weapons--was a major scientific and industrial undertaking. This is the story of the people who made it happen. As journalist and author Graff writes in this excellent oral history, published on the 80th anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the three-year project was "a crash wartime effort…with whole new cities and facilities carved out of mountains and deserts to employ hundreds of thousands of people…inventing new technologies in a matter of just weeks and months in the hope of building a bomb more powerful than any before out of materials that at the start of the war existed only in microscopic amounts, and all of it…classified and cloaked in silence and mystery." The book tracks the major facilities created for the project: Oak Ridge, Tennessee, center of the uranium refinement effort; Hanford, Washington, focused on plutonium production; and Los Alamos, New Mexico, where hundreds of scientists and engineers designed and built the bombs that brought an end to World War II. The 500 voices who make up the oral history include famous and less-known figures, such as members of the crew who created the first controlled nuclear chain reaction; farmers whose land was needed to build massive complexes to produce enriched uranium and plutonium for the bombs; "project spouses" at all three locations raising families under difficult living conditions; politicians and military men involved in planning and executing the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and Japanese survivors of the bombings. Tohru Hara, a sixth-grade student, poignantly recalled that Hiroshima, "burning steadily for a day and a night, presently became a city of death. All that was left was a hell. People who had lost the last energy to live were lying with the railroad tracks for their pillow." A comprehensive and engrossing account of the atomic bomb's creation--and its effects. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.