Oppenheimer and the Atomic Bomb: Young Readers Edition of AMERICAN PROMETHEUS: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer - Couverture rigide

Sherwin, Martin J.; Bird, Kai; Singer, Eric

Couverture rigide

ISBN 10 : 0593856457 ISBN 13 : 9780593856451

Editeur : G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers, 2025

Synopsis

The #1 New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus was the inspiration for the blockbuster film, OPPENHEIMER, and is now adapted for young readers.

This brand-new edition introduces the next generation to one of the twentieth century's most iconic and complex global figures.

J. Robert Oppenheimer was a brilliant physicist who led the American effort to build the atomic bomb during World War II, and who later found himself confronting the moral consequences of the revolutionary weapon he helped create. 

Readers of all ages will witness the rise and fall of a scientific and historical icon in this masterful new edition. Exploring his childhood, his secret work on the bomb, his central role in the Cold War, and his tragic downfall, this quintessential biography is history at its finest, riveting and deeply informative, and now available to a younger audience.

A propos du livre

À propos de l?auteur

KAI BIRD is an award-winning historian and journalist. Executive Director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography, he is the acclaimed author of biographies of John J. McCloy, McGeorge and William Bundy, Robert Ames, and President Jimmy Carter. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (co-authored with Martin J. Sherwin), which was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film Oppenheimer. His work has been honored with the BIO Award for his significant contributions to the art and craft of biography. He has also written about the Vietnam War, Hiroshima, nuclear weapons, the Cold War, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the CIA. He lives in New York City and Washington, D.C., with his wife, Susan Goldmark.

MARTIN J. SHERWIN (1937-2021) served on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, and as the Walter S. Dickson Professor of English and American History at Tufts University, where he founded the Nuclear Age History and Humanities Center. He was the author of A World Destroyed: Hiroshima and Its Legacies, which won the Stuart L. Bernath Prize, as well as the American History Book Prize, and also wrote Gambling with Armageddon: Nuclear Roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

ERIC S. SINGER is a high school and university educator, and historian of the Cold War in the United States. He served on the faculty of the University of Baltimore, where he taught about the Cold War’s impact on ordinary Americans’ lives, and other social, political, and structural forces that shaped American culture over four centuries. He previously adapted Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick's The Untold History of the United States. His work has been featured in Hamburg Institute for Social Research’s Angst im Kalten Kreig (Fear in the Cold War), Urban History, The Nation, The Baltimore Sun, San Francisco Chronicle, Teen Vogue, and The Baltimore Banner. He lives outside Washington, D.C., with his wife, daughter, and dog, Umji.

Extrait. © Reproduit sur autorisation. Tous droits réservés.

PROLOGUE
August 6, 1945
8:15 a.m.
Hiroshima, Japan
Ten-­year-­old Toshio Nakamura woke from a short night’s sleep. He was home in Hiroshima, Japan, eating peanuts as he sat on his bedroll. Suddenly, without warning, an enormous FLASH bathed the space around him in a blinding white light. Before he knew it, he and his two younger sisters, Myeko and Yaeko, were in the air—­a violent blast blew them clear across the room. Toshio landed on top of Myeko, whose legs were pinned under a piece of fallen timber. She was crying, “Mother, help me!”
With a mother’s reflex, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura ran to her children, desperate to dig them out of the debris. Toshio was unharmed, but Myeko was buried up to her chest. Yaeko was still below—­silent. Frantically, Mrs. Nakamura threw aside shards of broken tile and lifted the heavy pieces of timber pinning her two daughters. She quickly freed Myeko. Then she saw Yaeko’s arm. She tugged.
“Itai! It hurts!” Yaeko wailed.
Relieved that her children were unharmed, Mrs. Nakamura yelled back, “There’s no time now to say whether it hurts or not.” Then she jerked Yaeko up, freeing her from the remains of their collapsed house.
The Nakamuras went out to the street. They gasped in disbelief, for in front of them lay a scene of utter destruction. All the houses on their block had been reduced to piles of rubble, just like theirs.
As they would later find out, the four-­engined American B-­29 SuperfortressEnola Gay had just dropped on their city the first atomic bomb ever used in war. The bomb exploded two thousand feet over Hiroshima’s main shopping district, and in less than a second, the temperature at ground zero reached seven thousand degrees Fahrenheit. People as far away as one half mile instantly turned to water vapor. Statues melted, roof tiles fused together, and buildings caught fire or exploded with unimaginable ferocity. At least eighty thousand people died immediately. The Nakamuras’ house was about three-quarters of a mile from the center of the explosion, sparing them that fate.
“The neighbors were walking around burned and bleeding,” Toshio later recalled. “We went to the park. A whirlwind came. At night a gas tank burned, and I saw the reflection in the river. We stayed in the park [that] night. Next day I went to Taiko Bridgeand met my girlfriends Kikuki and Murakami. They were looking for their mothers. But Kikuki’s mother was wounded, and Murakami’s mother, alas, was dead.”2
Three Days Later
Nagasaki, Japan
Shortly after 11:00 in the morning, twelve-­year-­old Hiroyasu Tagawa heard the distant whir of a plane flying high over his aunt’s house, where he was staying with his sister. Four months earlier, an evacuation forced the family to leave their home in downtown Nagasaki. So that the kids could remain close to school, they agreed to temporarily split up. Hiroyasu and his sister moved in with their aunt, who lived a short distance from town, while their parents moved to Urakami, a neighborhood farther up the Urakami River on the city’s northern fringe.
Hiroyasu ran out to the garden. He looked up to the sky. Sure enough, a plane sailed high over the mountaintop, the sun glinting off the metal of its fuselage.
Suddenly, everything turned orange. Hiroyasu quickly covered his eyes and ears and dropped to the ground. This was the position he practiced daily at school for times like this. “Soon dust and debris and pieces of glass were flying everywhere,” he recalled. “After that, silence.”

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: G.P. Putnam's Sons Books for Young Readers
• Date d'édition: 2025
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 0593856457
• ISBN 13: 9780593856451
• Reliure: Relié
• Nombre de pages: 336
• Coordonnées du fabricant: G.P. Putnam's Sons; https://www.penguin.com/putnam/; ; 1745 BROADWAY Attn: Madison Forsander; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; Etats-Unis
• Personne responsable: non disponible