Wow... Grade A+ ... Exceptional.

This book has some dense topics and could get bogged down in explanations. But instead it flows effortlessly.

Politics, physics, engineering, culture, warfare, isolationism, human factors, history...
All explained thoroughly, smoothly, and entertainingly!

At no point does it feel like you are learning physics. But he starts by giving a good solid entertaining history of the physics needed for the later engineering and political discussions.

I listen to many nonfiction audiobooks and I've never heard Holter Graham before. But he is immediately one of my very favorites. He does a wonderful job keeping the material fun.

This book won every non-Fiction award and still stands up today. If you are interested in this topic you will not find a better book than this. There is no acceptable reason not to select this book if you like this topic.

51 people found this helpful

Beware limitations of the reader

I wish they had persuaded author Richard Rhoads to do the reading himself. Graham is a proficient voice actor but I find this reading difficult to listen to for two reasons: Firstly, the recording is too fast; I have to slow the audio to 3/4 speed. Perhaps this was forced on him due to the length of the book, but the reading speed seems forced. Secondly, and this is less forgivable, the reader is evidently quite unfamiliar with the subject matter and has not done proper preparation. This shows up in mispronunciations of the names of many of the key players of this story, famous men of physics who are well known—people like Theodore von Karman, John von Neumann, Bernhard Riemann, Hans Geiger, and others. Inexplicable are mispronunciations of regular English words. I urge Audible to make a stronger effort to achieve accurate readings of their audio books. These deficiencies are preventable, and should be prevented.

41 people found this helpful

Epic Story, Nice Physics History, Poor Narration

What did you love best about The Making of the Atomic Bomb?

History of Physics.

Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Holter Graham?

I would find a narrator who takes responsibility for pronouncing names and foreign words at least somewhat correctly. For a narrator to make so many mistakes as Graham did is very unprofessional. He even pronounced the often recurring names like Feynman, von Neumann, and Göttingen incorrectly. This is such a fantastic book about a subject very important to our species' history, you would think the narrator would put a little effort into finding out the correct pronunciations, and practicing them if necessary.

Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?

Epic and very moving story.

33 people found this helpful

Tremendous book, awful narrator

Making of the Atomic Bomb is a book I can read over and over. Unfortunately, this is an audio book I can't even finish once. The narrator's cadence is distracting, like one of the bad caricatures of William Shatner. He mangles foreign words and names, all while always pausing before them and pronouncing them in an exaggerated "foreign voice" (and in this book, that's a LOT of foreign words and names). I tried hard, got 8 hours in -- but I've reached my limit. Please, buy this book, and skip this audible.

31 people found this helpful

Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds

“Now we are all sons of bitches.”
― Richard Bainbridge, quoted in Richard Rhodes, Making of the Atomic Bomb

I use the world masterpiece with a certain reservation. It is overused. Abused even. It is a word that can easily lose its power if diffused into too many works by too many authors. However, I can say unabashedly that this book, this history, is a masterpiece of narrative history. It is powerful, inspirational, sad, detailed, thrilling, chilling. It has hundreds of characters. Some like the early physicists almost seem like lucky gods born at the right time. How can you not love Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Ernest Rutherford, Marie Curie? These giants seemed to fall into the right spot in history with all the brain cells needed. But on top of this, they were amazing men and women; kind and nobel. They seem to possess not just the smarts to deal with post-Newtonian physics, but a certain amount of poetry and philosophy. They seem like the Founding Fathers (and mothers) of the 20th century and the modern age.

There are also the smaller gods. The gods of war. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Teller, etc. Richard Rhodes covers them all. He explores the development of nuclear physics without losing the reader, he follows the development of the bomb and the enrichment of uranium and production of plutonium. He details the work and the failures in Japan and German. He provides a fair assessment of the environment and the horror of World War 2. He literally leaves few stones unturned. The bombs when they come seem both anticipated and surprising. I felt a pressure in my shoulders and neck as I read about the Trinity tests and the dropping of the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But Rhodes doesn't let the reader off the hook. He spend almost 20 pages detailing the oral histories of those who saw the effects of the bombs first hand in Hiroshima. Those who lived to tell the horrible tale.

If there are heroes in this tale, they are always heroes with a dark asterisk, or Quixotic heroes. Bohr trying to convince politicians to take risks with peace, to convince war leaders to think beyond the dropping of a bomb. Szilard trying desperately to convince scientists to remain quiet in the beginning to avoid Germany finding out, and later working to convince England and the US to include the Soviet Union to avoid an arms race. There is Oppenheimer and his struggles with the fate that his gifts provided for him to midwifing this rough beast into existence.

It is a noble and a sad and a horrific and a beautiful book all at once and it deserved all of the awards (Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award) it won.

I have read hundreds of nonfiction books and thousand of books, and only a dozen may be better.

28 people found this helpful

Fantastic book, very poor narration

If you could sum up The Making of the Atomic Bomb in three words, what would they be?

Richard Rodes' book is a genuine tour de force, and is an exemplar of detailed popular science. I'm very glad to see it on Audible. I've been waiting for this for a long time.

However... to someone who is even vaguely aware of the story, and the characters and places that are so prominent, the narration is very jarring. The narrator mispronounces about 70-75% of foreign words. It would (indeed should) have been trivially easy to give poor Mr Graham a pronunciation guide.

What other book might you compare The Making of the Atomic Bomb to and why?

Dark Sun, also by Richard Rhodes. It is a continuation of the story told by The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

Would you be willing to try another one of Holter Graham’s performances?

Under duress - for example, if the only unabridged narration of Dark Sun was by him, I would consider it, but PLEASE either educate him on pronunciation or get someone else to narrate it.

If you were to make a film of this book, what would the tag line be?

This film will disappoint anyone who has read and enjoyed the book. Don't watch it!

26 people found this helpful

A brilliant author is drowned by its narrator.

This book wasn’t for you, but who do you think might enjoy it more?

Richard Rhodes' "A Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb" I rank up there with Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything". Both authors reading their own material - an intimacy with their knowledge carves such authentic presence into their narrative that it becomes transparent, effortless and all you want is more.

Has The Making of the Atomic Bomb turned you off from other books in this genre?

Unlistenable after experiencing the author's own reading of "A Dark Sun".

How did the narrator detract from the book?

The book is drowned in a hyperbolically emphatic staccato of a voice see-sawing like a bee buzz dive-bombing through every sentence. Great science lost to over presentation. Please be a leaf on the river and not boulder in the middle of it.

Any additional comments?

Listen to a sample of A Dark Sun. Feel the difference. It is sad for us to lose this book. Same as with "A Winters Tale", a book I'd read and loved deeply but the narrator made it torture.

21 people found this helpful

Not what I expected

The historical coverage was pretty thorough. As a story, though, it jumped around in time, which made the history a little disjointed. There is only one narrating voice, which also added to confusion in the performance. What is really disappointing on a very scientific and technical subject is the non-scientific delivery of basic units of time. Where time units were abbreviated in the text as 's' (for seconds) and 'ms' (for milliseconds), they were read as 's' and 'ms' in the narration.

16 people found this helpful

20 Kilotons of Information

This book is the unquestionable standard for understanding ALL the events leading up to the detonation of the first Atomic bomb and its subsequent use against Japan. The details are all here. It starts from the very beginning when physicists were just starting to arrange elements on the periodic table and ends when Hirohito realizes the futility of going forward with the war, thereby saving his country from further despair. It's a well written book, but it ended too early. As you learn, the fission explosions at Trinity and elsewhere were literally just a precursor for what the atomic scientists called "The Super". And surprising to me, the plans were already on the board when Trinity lit up the morning sky over New Mexico. I think we need a equally well written book as to how Trinity evolved into the Titian 2 program with 9 Megaton warheads ready to strike anywhere in the world.

15 people found this helpful

Very good

What made the experience of listening to The Making of the Atomic Bomb the most enjoyable?

Excellent book. Filled with tiny details. Enjoyed and learned an important history.

A complain: One of the highly used words in the book is 'Goettingen'. It is not pronounced properly throughout the book. I heard many different pronunciation of Goettingen. It is one of the important cities concerning the complete history of quantum mechanics. Its worth pronouncing it correctly.

So, could give five stars.

15 people found this helpful