My most profound read of the year was "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" by Richard Rhodes. Although I rarely check in on that other platform nowadays, I happened to see @mrnugget wax lyrical about the book. Since he personally recommended most of my other best reads of 2023 I knew I had to dig into it.
Occasionally a book, play, or film just reaches into your worldview and imposes a shift. This book did that for me; one of very few.
Atomic Bomb is not a new book – in two weeks it will be 38 years old. Nor is it a light read: The paperback weighs in at 896 pages. I read the excellent audiobook during runs and travels. The books are somewhat hard to get hold of.
"The Making of the Atomic Bomb" might be the greatest literary gesamtkunstwerk I have read. It's a historical work that reads like a novel. It's a collection of biographies that artfully dramatizes the subjects' lives. It's a book about science that makes much of nuclear physics wonderfully accessible. It's the best exposition of 20th century history I've found, including the Cold War. It presents political science in an accessible way. Towards the end, it confronts the reader with the terrible ethics of our capability, but without deigning to prescribe. Yet most of all, it is a beautifully philosophical work, and Rhodes has this Beethovian sense of pace where he can be describing an aspect of history in a scholarly tone for a while and then suddenly modulate into the philosophy of human nature.
Just picking a random example, here is Rhodes casually describing the young Niels Bohr's relationship with his brother, Harald:
"In my whole youth,' Bohr reminisced, my brother played a very large part ... I had very much to do with my brother. He was in all respects more clever than I.' Harald in turn told whoever asked that he was merely an ordinary person and his brother pure gold, and seems to have meant it."
In the very next paragraph, with a perfect sense of pace, Rhodes suddenly pulls the relaxed reader into philosophy, to segue into a scientific concept:
"Speech is a clumsiness and writing an impoverishment. Not language, but the surface of the body is the child's first map of the world, undifferentiated between subject and object, coextensive with the world it maps until awakening consciousness divides it off. Niels Bohr liked to show how a stick used as a probe – a blind man's cane, for example – became an extension of the arm."
From there the text flows from biography to science again.
I had read John Hersey's "Hiroshima" many years ago, but the latter part of "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" brought the reality home again much more deeply. I am left with that concern that as a society we are caught in Kundera's unbearable lightness of being, where the bloody events of the late 40s have turned into "mere words, theories, and discussions, have become lighter than feathers, frightening no one." There is an infinite difference between a Hiroshima that occurs only once in history, and a bombing that eternally returns.
