Richard Rhodes

**Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award**The definitive history of nuclear weaponsfrom the turn-of-the-century discovery of nuclear energy to J. Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Projectthis epic work details the science, the people, and the sociopolitical realities that led to the development of the atomic bomb.This sweeping account begins in the 19th century, with the discovery of nuclear fission, and continues to World War Two and the Americans race to beat Hitlers Nazis. That competition launched the Manhattan Project and the nearly overnight construction of a vast military-industrial complex that culminated in the fateful dropping of the first bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.Reading like a character-driven suspense novel, the book introduces the players in this saga of physics, politics, and human psychologyfrom FDR and Einstein to the visionary scientists who pioneered quantum theory and the application of thermonuclear fission, including Planck, Szilard, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, Meitner, von Neumann, and Lawrence.From nuclear powers earliest foreshadowing in the work of H.G. Wells to the bright glare of Trinity at Alamogordo and the arms race of the Cold War, this dread invention forever changed the course of human history, and The Making of The Atomic Bomb provides a panoramic backdrop for that story.Richard Rhodess ability to craft compelling biographical portraits is matched only by his rigorous scholarship. Told in rich human, political, and scientific detail that any reader can follow, The Making of the Atomic Bomb is a thought-provoking and masterful work.

Con información inédita del Tribunal de Nuremberg, Rhodes traza la desconocida y trágica historia de la primera fase devastadora misión de los nazis. Revela la capacidad humana de destrucción y la emocion patologica de la maldad extrema no solo con testimonios de supervivientes y entrevistas sino tambien gracias al delirio nazi por el detalle estadistico.

Los Einsatzgruppen fueron pelotones de exterminio formados por la Policía de Seguridad y la SS, que asesinaros a miles de polacos y judíos a comienzos de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Con información del Tribunal de Nuremberg ignorada hasta ahora, Rhodes ha trazado la desconocida y tragica historia de la primera fase de la Solucion Final. El resultado es escalofriante, sobre todo por lo que revela acerca de la capacidad humana de la destruccion, la emocion patologica de la maldad extrema, dibujada en el relato a traves de testimonios de supervivientes, entrevistas e informacion y documentacion. Se centra asi no solo en la experiencia de las victimas, sino tambien en los metodos y personalidades de los asesinos, demostrando como el asesinato individualizado condujo al asesinato industrializado en la segunda fase del Holocausto.

From the Pulitzer Prizewinning and bestselling author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, The most extraordinary book about the Spanish Civil War ever encountered (The Washington Post).The Spanish Civil War (19361939) inspired and haunted an extraordinary number of exceptional artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and John Dos Passos. The idealism of the causedefending democracy from fascism at a time when Europe was darkening toward another world warand the brutality of the conflict inspired some of their best work: Guernica, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Homage to Catalonia, The Spanish Earth.The war spurred breakthroughs in military and medical technology as well. New aircraft, new weapons, new tactics and strategy all emerged during this time. Progress arose from the horror: the doctors and nurses who volunteered to serve with the Spanish defenders devised major advances in battlefield surgery and frontline blood transfusion. In those ways, and in many others, the Spanish Civil War served as a test bed for World War II, and for the entire twentieth century.From the life of John James Audubon to the invention of the atomic bomb, readers have long relied on Richard Rhodes to explain, distill, and dramatize crucial moments in history. Now, he takes us into battlefields and bomb shelters, into the studios of artists, into the crowded wards of war hospitals, and into the hearts and minds of a rich cast of characters to show how the ideological, aesthetic, and technological developments that emerged in Spain and changed the world forever. Hell and Good Company is vivid and emotivethrilling reading (The Wall Street Journal).

Pulitzer Prize winning author, Richard Rhodess year-long journey into the heart of American agriculture reveals a life trapped between two eras: the modern and the traditional, the future and the past.Richly textured and deeply moving, Farm chronicles a year in the life of Tom and Sally Bauer of Crevecoeur County, Missouri, who cultivate nearly two square miles of the surface of the earth. They struggle to build up their farm, harvesting corn, birthing calves, planting wheat, coping with the vagaries of nature and government regulations. Required of them are ancient skills (an attunement to the weather, animals, crops, and land) as well as a mastery of modern technology, from high-tech machinery to genetics and sophisticated chemicals.Written with honesty and insight, Farm is a revelatory exploration of farm life in the 20th century and the joys and challenges of the modern rural landscape.

A brilliant and illuminating exploration of one mans sexual odyssey, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb and A Hole in the World.Making Love marks the first time a major author has written with such unapologetic candor of his most intimate experiences, fantasies, and thoughts. From his sexual coming of age to his work with ESO (Extended Sexual Orgasm), Richard Rhodes has created both an insightful memoir and a provocative treatise on sex, taboo, love, and power.

Technology was the blessing and the bane of the twentieth century. Human life span nearly doubled in the West, but in no century were more human beings killed by new technologies of war. Improvements in agriculture now feed increasing billions, but pesticides and chemicals threaten to poison the earth. Does technology improve us or diminish us? Enslave us or make us free? With this first-ever collection of the essential twentieth-century writings on technology, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Richard Rhodes explores the optimism, ambivalence, and wrongheaded judgments with which Americans have faced an ever-shifting world.Visions of Technology collects writings on events from the Great Exposition of 1900 and the invention of the telegraph to the advent of genetic counseling and the defeat of Garry Kasparov by IBMs chess-playing computer, Deep Blue. Its gems of opinion and history include Henry Ford on the horseless carriage, Robert Caro on the transformation of New York City, J. Robert Oppenheimer on science and war, Loretta Lynn on the Pill and much more. Together, they chronicle an unprecedented century of change.

In this brilliant and gripping medical detective story. Richard Rhodes follows virus hunters on three continents as they track the emergence of a deadly new brain disease that first kills cannibals in New Guinea, then cattle and young people in Britain and Franceand that has already been traced to food animals in the United States. In a new afterword for the paperback, Rhodes reports the latest US and worldwide developments of a burgeoning global threat.

Here, for the first time, in a brilliant, panoramic portrait by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, is the definitive, often shocking story of the politics and the science behind the development of the hydrogen bomb and the birth of the Cold War.Based on secret files in the United States and the former Soviet Union, this monumental work of history discloses how and why the United States decided to create the bomb that would dominate world politics for more than forty years.

Pocos biólogos en la larga historia de esa ciencia han sido tanproductivos, innovadores y controvertidos como Edward OsborneWilson, nacido en Alabama. Hoy en día está considerado el científicomás importante destacado de su tiempo por sus contribucionespioneras en la biodiversidad y la sociobiologia.Fascinado desde temprana edad por el mundo natural en general ylas hormigas en particular, su trabajo de campo sobre ellas y sobretodos los insectos sociales ha ampliado enormemente nuestroconocimiento de sus muchas especies y fascinantes formas deser. Este trabajo condujo a su libro Sociobiologia de 1975, quecreo una tormenta intelectual a partir de su afirmacion de quetodo el comportamiento animal, incluido el de los humanos, serige por las leyes de la evolucion y la genetica. Posteriormente,Wilson se ha convertido en una voz destacada sobre la importanciacrucial de la biodiversidad para toda forma de vida y ha trabajadoincansablemente para sintetizar los campos de la ciencia y lashumanidades de manera fructifera.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes delivers a remarkable story of science history: how a ravishing film star and an avant-garde composer invented spread-spectrum radio, the technology that made wireless phones, GPS systems, and many other devices possible. Beginning at a Hollywood dinner table, Hedys Folly tells a wild story of innovation that culminates in U.S. patent number 2,292,387 for a "secret communication system." Along the way Rhodes weaves together Hollywoods golden era, the history of Vienna, 1920s Paris, weapons design, music, a tutorial on patent law and a brief treatise on transmission technology. Narrated with the rigor and charisma weve come to expect of Rhodes, it is a remarkable narrative adventure about spread-spectrum radios genesis and unlikely amateur inventors collaborating to change the world.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes delivers a riveting account of the nuclear arms race and the Cold War.In the Reagan-Gorbachev era, the United States and the Soviet Union came within minutes of nuclear war, until Gorbachev boldly launched a campaign to eliminate nuclear weapons, setting the stage for the 1986 Reykjavik summit and the incredible events that followed. In this thrilling, authoritative narrative, Richard Rhodes draws on personal interviews with both Soviet and U.S. participants and a wealth of new documentation to unravel the compelling, shocking story behind this monumental time in human historyits beginnings, its nearly chilling consequences, and its effects on global politics today.

John James Audubon came to America as a dapper eighteen-year-old eager to make his fortune. He had a talent for drawing and an interest in birds, and he would spend the next thirty-five years traveling to the remotest regions of his new countryoften alone and on footto render his avian subjects on paper. The works of art he created gave the world its idea of America. They gave America its idea of itself. Here Richard Rhodes vividly depicts Audubons life and career: his epic wanderings; his quest to portray birds in a lifelike way; his long, anguished separations from his adored wife; his ambivalent witness to the vanishing of the wilderness. John James Audubon: The Making of an American is a magnificent achievement.

A masterful, timely, fully authorized biography of the great and hugely influential biologist and naturalist E. O. Wilson, one of the most ground-breaking and controversial scientists of our timefrom the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic BombAn impressive account of one of the 20th centurys most prominent biologists, for whom the natural world is a sanctuary and a realm of boundless adventure; the fewer the people in it, the better. The New York Times Book ReviewFew biologists in the long history of that science have been as productive, as ground-breaking and as controversial as the Alabama-born Edward Osborne Wilson. At 91 years of age he may be the most eminent American scientist in any field.Fascinated from an early age by the natural world in general and ants in particular, his field work on them and on all social insects has vastly expanded our knowledge of their many species and fascinating ways of being. This work led to his 1975 book Sociobiology, which created an intellectual firestorm from his contention that all animal behavior, including that of humans, is governed by the laws of evolution and genetics. Subsequently Wilson has become a leading voice on the crucial importance to all life of biodiversity and has worked tirelessly to synthesize the fields of science and the humanities in a fruitful way.Richard Rhodes is himself a towering figure in the field of science writing and he has had complete and unfettered access to Wilson, his associates, and his papers in writing this book. The result is one of the most accomplished and anticipated and urgently needed scientific biographies in years.

In Masters of Death, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Rhodes gives full weight, for the first time, to the Einsatzgruppens role in the Holocaust. These special task forces, organized by Heinrich Himmler to follow the German army as it advanced into eastern Poland and Russia, were the agents of the first phase of the Final Solution. They murdered more than 1.5 million men, women, and children between 1941 and 1943, often by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar. These massive crimes have been generally overlooked or underestimated by Holocaust historians, who have focused on the gas chambers. In this painstaking account, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes profiles the eastern campaigns architects as well as its ordinary soldiers and policemen, and helps us understand how such men were conditioned to carry out mass murder. Marshaling a vast array of documents and the testimony of perpetrators and survivors, this book is an essential contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and World War II.

Why do some men, women and even children assault, batter, rape, mutilate and murder? In his stunning new book, the Pulitzer Prize-winner Richard Rhodes provides a startling and persuasive answer.Why They Killexplores the discoveries of a maverick American criminologist, Dr. Lonnie Athens -- himself the child of a violent family -- which challenge conventional theories about violent behavior. By interviewing violent criminals in prison, Dr. Athens has identified a pattern of social development common to all seriously violent people -- a four-stage process he calls "violentization": -- First, brutalization: A young person is forced by violence or the threat of violence to submit to an aggressive authority figure; he witnesses the violent subjugation of intimates, and the authority figure coaches him to use violence to settle disputes.-- Second, belligerency: The dispirited subject, determined to prevent his further violent subjugation, heeds his coach and resolves to resort to violence.-- Third, violent performances: His violent response to provocation succeeds, and he reads respect and fear in the eyes of others.-- Fourth, virulency: Exultant, he determines from now on to utilize serious violence as a means of dealing with people -- and he bonds with others who believe as he does.Since all four stages must be fully experienced in sequence and completed to produce a violent individual, we see how intervening to interrupt the process can prevent a tragic outcome.Rhodes supports Athenss theory with historical evidence and shows how it explains such violent careers as those of Perry Smith (the killer central to Truman Capotes narrative In Cold Blood), Mike Tyson, "preppy rapist" Alex Kelly, and Lee Harvey Oswald.Why They Kill challenges with devastating evidence the theory that violent behavior is impulsive, unconsciously motivated and predetermined. It offers compelling insights into the terrible, ongoing dilemma of criminal violence that plagues families, neighborhoods, cities and schools.

The culminating volume in Richard Rhodess monumental and prizewinning history of nuclear weapons, offering the first comprehensive narrative of the challenges faced in a postCold War age.The past twenty years have transformed our relationship with nuclear weapons drastically. With extraordinary depth of knowledge and understanding, Rhodes makes clear how the five original nuclear powersRussia, Great Britain, France, China, and especially the United Stateshave struggled with new realities. He shows us how the stage was set for a second tragic war when Iraq secretly destroyed its nuclear infrastructure and reveals the real reasons George W. Bush chose to fight a second war in Iraq. We see how the efforts of U.S. weapons labs laid the groundwork for nuclear consolidation in the former Soviet Union, how and why South Africa secretly built and then destroyed a small nuclear arsenal, and how Jimmy Carters private diplomacy prevented another Korean War.We also see how the present day represents a nuclear turning point and what hope exists for our future. Rhodes assesses the emerging threat of nuclear terrorism and offers advice on how our complicated relationships with North Korea and South Asia should evolve. Finally, he imagines what a post-nuclear world might look like, suggesting what might make it possible.Powerful and persuasive, The Twilight of the Bombs is an essential work of contemporary history.