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Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race
Richard Rhodes’s third volume on the nuclear age asks a question the first two did not: not how the weapons were made, but why there came to be seventy thousand of them, and how the making finally stopped. He begins at Chernobyl, because the reactor that exploded was a military design, because the cover-up was…
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Energy: A Human History
Four hundred years of how the world got its power, told through the people who found it. Shakespeare’s company steals a playhouse for its timber because London is running out of wood. A Devon ironmonger’s cracked cylinder accidentally invents the condenser. Nantucket whalers chase the sperm whale to the far side of the world for…
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The Making of the Atomic Bomb
The book that won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and has not been superseded in forty years. Richard Rhodes begins with a Hungarian physicist crossing a London street in 1933 and ends with a Japanese doctor’s nightmare, and in between builds three books into one: how physics…
An Official Ferrand Repository
Every book gives back