The devil reached toward the sky : an oral history of the making & unleashing of the atomic bomb
(2025)

Nonfiction

Book

Call Numbers:
NEW HISTORY
SR CENTER/NONFICTION/GRAFF,G

Availability

Locations Call Number Status
New & Popular History NEW HISTORY Due: 2/1/2026
New & Popular History NEW HISTORY Available
New & Popular History NEW HISTORY Available
Senior Center General Nonfiction SR CENTER/NONFICTION/GRAFF,G Available (not Holdable)
 
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Details

PUBLISHED
New York : Avid Reader Press, 2025
EDITION
First Avid Reader Press hardcover edition
DESCRIPTION

xxxii, 567 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (some color), maps ; 25 cm

ISBN/ISSN
9781668092392, 1668092395 :, 1668092395, 9781668092392
LANGUAGE
English
NOTES

Color maps on lining papers

Author's note -- Foreword: Dawn at Trinity -- Part I Exploring the atom. Particles unseen ; Darkness falls on Europe ; Fleeing fascism ; Adjusting to the New World ; The M.A.U.D. Committee ; December 7, 1941 -- Part II Imagining a bomb. Setting up the Met lab ; FDR's OK ; Creating the Manhattan Engineer District ; Three big decisions ; Making the pile ; Chain reaction -- Part III Making the bomb. Oak Ridge: creating the Clinton Engineer Works ; Oak Ridge: Y-12 ; Oak Ridge: living inside the gates ; Oak Ridge: making U-235 ; Los Alamos: Project Y ; Los Alamos: working on the Mesa ; Life on bathtub row ; Oak Ridge: glimpsing plutonium ; Los Alamos: designing the bomb ; Hanford: life in a construction camp ; Hanford: making plutonium en masse ; Hanford: the B Reactor -- Part IV Readying the bomb. Boeing's bomber ; Code name Silverplate ; Training the 509th ; Spring 1945 ; 100 tons of TNT ; Selecting the targets ; The interim committee ; Trinity ; Potsdam with Truman -- Part V Unleashing the bomb. At Tinian ; Moving the bomb ; The day before ; Code name Centerboard ; Ground zero in Hiroshima ; Landing at Tinian ; Hiroshima burning ; Reaction to the bomb ; The day after in Hiroshima ; Mission #16 ; Ground zero at Nagasaki ; The return of Bockscar ; Afterward in Nagasaki ; V-J Day ; The sickness -- Epilogue -- Acknowledgments -- A note on sources -- Source notes -- Index -- Image credits

"On the 80th anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the Pulitzer Prize finalist whose work is 'oral history at its finest' (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) delivers an epic narrative of the atomic bomb's creation and deployment, woven from the voices of hundreds of scientists, generals, soldiers, and civilians. ... Drawing from dozens of oral history archives and hundreds of books, reports, letters, diaries, and transcripts from across the US, Japan, and Europe, Graff masterfully blends the memories and perspectives from the known and unknown--key figures like J. Robert Oppenheimer, General Leslie Groves, and President Truman; the crews of the B-29 bombers; and the haunting stories of the Hibakusha--the 'bomb-affected people.' Both a testament to human ingenuity and resilience and a compelling drama told by the participants who lived it, The Devil Reached Toward the Sky is a singular, profound, and searing book about the inception of our most powerful weapon and its haunting legacy"--