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Narrated by Roy Samuelson
Steve SheinkinUnabridged — 7 hours, 11 minutes
Narrated by Roy Samuelson
Steve SheinkinUnabridged — 7 hours, 11 minutes
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Sheinkin has an architect's sense of form: how much to say here, when to jump there, and how cantilevered parts work together to create a deft and seemingly effortless whole. His tale is a lively one, peppered with arresting first-person quotations, and it never takes too long to immerse readers in what he calls, with considerable understatement, "a big story." This is pulse-pounding history for Alex Rider fans.
—Marc Aronson
…in this fast-paced thriller that happens to be fascinatingly true…[Sheinkin] brings to intriguing life the historical figures who can seem so remote to modern kids.…
—Mary Quattlebaum
This superb and exciting work of nonfiction would be a fine tonic for any jaded adolescent who thinks history is "boring." It's also an excellent primer for adult readers who may have forgotten, or never learned, the remarkable story of how nuclear weaponry was first imagined, invented and deployed—and of how an international arms race began well before there was such a thing as an atomic bomb.” —The Wall Street Journal
“A must-read…” —Publishers Weekly, starred review
“A superb tale of an era and an effort that forever changed our world.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“[a] complicated thriller that intercuts action with the deftness of a Hollywood blockbuster.” —Booklist
“...reads like an international spy thriller, and that's the beauty of it.” —School Library Journal, starred review
“This is edge-of-the seat material that will resonate with YAs who clamor for true spy stories, and it will undoubtedly engross a cross-market audience of adults who dozed through the World War II unit in high school.” —Bulletin of the Center of Children’s Books, starred review
Real-life spy stories can read like the best fiction, and Sheinkin (The Notorious Benedict Arnold, 2009) knows exactly how to write them. In Bomb, he interweaves three stories of high espionage, starting with Harry Gold, the spy who fed the Soviets the secrets of Los Alamos. Then there is Knut Haukelid, a Norwegian resistance fighter whose derring-do prevented the Germans from attaining the bomb toward the end of World War II. Finally, there are the scientists of the Manhattan project, led by Robert Oppenheimer, who understood better than anyone how this weapon would change the course of the future (“If atomic bombs are to be added as new weapons to the arsenals of a warring world…then the time will come when mankind will curse the names of Los Alamos and Hiroshima”). With history is this edge-of-your-seat riveting, it is easy to see why Sheinkin’s latest landed among the National Book Awards nominees this year.
(c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
It took several years of hard work and precise calculations for atomic energy to be developed. The genesis of what culminated in the dropping of bombs over Japan in WWII can be summed up in one word: recruitment. As American scientists were sought to design and build the bomb, Communist sympathizers were drawn, surreptitiously, to steal the secrets of one of the twentieth century’s most monumental inventions. Narrator Roy Samuelson lends an ironic tone—ironic in that the voice he uses to describe the incredibly powerful bombs is consistently calming. Using no vocal imitations and little emotional inflection, Samuelson conveys the bombs’ destructive power, the tension among the team members, and the importance of the project to the outcome of the war. His soothing tone works to help young listeners understand the critical history of the time. M.B. © AudioFile 2013, Portland, Maine
In late December 1938, German chemist Otto Hahn discovered that uranium atoms could be split, and just a few months later the race to build an atomic bomb was on. The story unfolds in three parts, covering American attempts to build the bomb, how the Soviets tried to steal American designs and how the Americans tried to keep the Germans from building a bomb. It was the eve of World War II, and the fate of the world was at stake, "[b]ut how was a theoretical physicist supposed to save the world?" It's a true spy thriller, ranging from the football stadium at the University of Chicago to the mountains of Norway, from the deserts of New Mexico to laboratories in East Tennessee, and all along the way spies in the United States were feeding sensitive information to the KGB. Groups of photographs are sprinkled throughout the volume, offering just enough visual support for the splendid character development in the writing, and thorough documentation is provided in the backmatter. It takes a lot of work to make a complicated subject clear and exciting, and from his prodigious research and storytelling skill, Sheinkin has created a nonfiction story young people will want to read. A superb tale of an era and an effort that forever changed our world. (source notes, quotation notes, acknowledgments, photo credits, index) (Nonfiction. 10 & up)
| BN ID: | 2940169407358 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Random House |
| Publication date: | 01/08/2013 |
| Edition description: | Unabridged |
| Age Range: | 10 - 14 Years |
SKINNY SUPERHERO
HARRY GOLD WAS RIGHT: This is a big story. It’s the story of the creation—and theft—of the deadliest weapon ever invented. The scenes speed around the world, from secret labs to commando raids to street-corner spy meetings. But like most big stories, this one starts small. Let’s pick up the action sixteen years before FBI agents cornered Harry Gold in Philadelphia. Let’s start 3,000 miles to the west, in Berkeley, California, on a chilly night in February 1934.
On a hill high above town, a man and woman sat in a parked car. In the driver’s seat was a very thin young physics professor named Robert Oppenheimer. Beside him sat his date, a graduate student named Melba Phillips. The two looked out at the view of San Francisco Bay.
It was a fine view, but Oppenheimer couldn’t seem to stay focused on the date. He turned to Phillips and asked, “Are you comfortable?”
She said she was.
“Mind if I get out and walk for a few minutes?”
She didn’t mind.
Oppenheimer got out and strolled into the darkness. Phillips wrapped a coat around her legs and waited. She waited a long time. At some point, she fell asleep.
She woke up in the middle of the night—the seat beside her was still empty. Worried, she stepped onto the road and waved down a passing police car.
“My escort went for a walk hours ago and he hasn’t returned,” she told the cop.
The police searched the park, but found nothing. They notified headquarters, and a wider search was begun. An officer drove to Oppenheimer’s apartment to look for useful clues.
He found the professor in bed, sound asleep.
The cop shook Oppenheimer awake and demanded an explanation. Oppenheimer said he’d gotten out of the car to think about physics. “I just walked and walked,” he said, “and I was home and I went to bed. I’m so sorry.”
A reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle got hold of the story and wrote an article with the headline: “Forgetful Prof Parks Girl, Takes Self Home.”
No one who knew Robert Oppenheimer was the least bit surprised.
* * *
HE’D ALWAYS BEEN DIFFERENT. A girl who knew Robert as a child in New York City described him as “very frail, very pink-cheeked, very shy, and very brilliant.”
Oppenheimer was a tougher critic. “A repulsively good little boy,” he said of himself. “My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.”
He was constantly getting sick, so his nervous parents tried to protect him by keeping him inside. While other boys played in the street, Robert sat alone in his room studying languages, devouring books of literature and science, and filling notebooks with poetry. Around kids his age he was awkward and quiet, never knowing what to say unless he could bring the conversation around to books. Then he would let loose annoying bursts of learning.
“Ask me a question in Latin,” he’d say, “and I’ll answer you in Greek.”
Hoping to toughen up their stick-skinny fourteen-year-old, Robert’s parents sent him to a sports summer camp. But he was an awful athlete and simply refused to participate. Then the other campers found out he wrote home every day, and that he liked poetry and looking for minerals. That’s when they started calling him “Cutie.”
Robert never fought back. He never even responded. That made his tormentors even angrier.
One night, after dinner, Robert went for a walk. A group of boys waited for him in the woods. They grabbed him, dragged him to the icehouse, and tossed him on the rough wood floor. They ripped off his shirt and pants, dipped a brush in green paint, and slapped the dripping bristles against his bony body.
Robert never said a word about the attack to camp counselors. “I don’t know how Robert stuck out those remaining weeks,” his only friend at camp later said. “Not many boys would have—or could have—but Robert did. It must have been hell for him.”
Science saved him. Robert dove deep into chemistry and physics in high school, graduated from Harvard University in 1925, then earned advanced degrees at top universities in Britain and Germany. Even in classes with some of the brightest students in the world, “Oppie,” as friends called him, never lost his know-it-all style. He interrupted physics lectures with his own theories, sometimes charging to the chalkboard, grabbing the chalk and declaring. “This can be done much better in the following manner.” Classmates got so annoyed they actually signed a petition asking him to allow others to speak in class. After that, Oppenheimer calmed down. A little bit. “The trouble,” a friend said, “is that Oppie is so quick on the trigger intellectually, that he puts the other guy at a disadvantage.”
He’d lucked into a thrilling time in theoretical physics. Physicists were just beginning to figure out what atoms look like, and how the tiny particles inside them move and affect each other. Theoretical physicists were the explorers of their day, using imagination and mind-bending math to dig deeper and deeper into the surprising inner workings of atoms. Oppenheimer knew he’d found his calling.
When he returned to the States, schools all over the country tried to hire him. He picked the University of California, in Berkeley, where he quickly built the country’s best theoretical physics program. Students who came to study with Oppenheimer quickly realized they were in for a wild ride. “When you took a question to him,” one student remembered, “he would spend hours—until midnight perhaps—exploring every angle with you.”
“He generally would answer patiently,” another student agreed, “unless the question was manifestly stupid, in which event his response was likely to be quite caustic.”
While sitting in on other professors’ lectures, Oppenheimer was known to squirm impatiently. “Oh, come now!” he’d call out. “We all know that. Let’s get on with it!”
Oppenheimer’s own lectures, according to a student named Edward Gerjuoy, were lightning bursts of ideas, theories, and math on the blackboard. “He spoke quite rapidly, and puffed equally rapidly,” Gerjuoy said. “When one cigarette burned down to a fragment he no longer could hold, he lit another.” Oppenheimer paced as he lectured, his wiry black hair sticking straight up, his large blue eyes flashing, as he furiously wrote, erased, wrote more, talked, puffed, and bobbed in and out of a cloud of white smoke.
During one lecture, he told students to think about a formula he’d written. There were dozens scrawled all over the board, and a student cut in to ask which formula he was talking about.
“Not that one,” Oppenheimer said, pointing to the blackboard, “the one underneath.”
There was no formula below that one, the student pointed out.
“Not below, underneath,” snapped Oppenheimer. “I have written over it.”
As one of Oppenheimer’s students put it: “Everyone sort of regarded him, very affectionately, as being sort of nuts.”
* * *
“I NEED PHYSICS MORE THAN FRIENDS,” Oppenheimer once told his younger brother. Lost in his studies, Oppenheimer paid little attention to the outside world. He didn’t hear about the stock market crash that triggered the Great Depression until six months after it happened. He first voted in a presidential election in 1936, at the age of thirty-two.
“Beginning in late 1936, my interests began to change,” he later said. There were a few reasons.
For one thing, the country’s ongoing economic troubles began to hit home. “I saw what the Depression was doing to my students. Often they could get no jobs,” he said. “And through them, I began to understand how deeply political and economic events could affect men’s lives. I began to feel the need to participate more fully in the life of the community.” Oppenheimer started going to political meetings and discussion groups. He began giving money to support causes like labor unions and striking farm workers.
But it wasn’t only events in the United States that caught Oppenheimer’s attention—he was also alarmed by the violent rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party in Germany. Hitler took over as chancellor of Germany in 1933 and started arresting political opponents and tossing them into concentration camps. With complete control of the country in his hands, Hitler began persecuting German Jews, stripping them of their legal rights, kicking them out of universities and government jobs. Oppenheimer, who was Jewish, still had family in Germany, as well as Jewish friends from his student days. When he heard that Hitler was harassing Jewish physicists, Oppenheimer dedicated a portion of his salary to help them escape Nazi Germany.
At the same time, the German dictator built up a huge military and started hacking out what he called a “Greater Germany,” a massive European empire that Hitler insisted rightfully belonged to Germans. He annexed neighboring Austria in 1938, then demanded a huge region of Czechoslovakia. Britain and France were strong enough to stand in Hitler’s way—but they caved in to his threats, hoping to preserve peace in Europe.
“This is my last territorial demand in Europe,” Hitler promised.
A few months later, he sent German troops into the rest of Czechoslovakia. Just twenty years after the end of World War I, it looked like a second world war was about to explode.
Oppenheimer followed these terrifying events from his home in California, burning with what he described as “a continuing, smoldering fury” toward Adolf Hitler.
But how was a theoretical physicist supposed to save the world?
Copyright © 2012 by Steve Sheinkin
