Richard Rhodes
Richard Rhodes (born
July 4,
1937) is an American author of both fiction and non-fiction (which he prefers to call "verity"), including the
Pulitzer Prize-winning
The Making of the Atomic Bomb in 1986, and most recently,
John James Audubon: the Making of an American in 2004. He has been awarded grants from the
Ford Foundation, the
Guggenheim Foundation, the
MacArthur Foundation and the
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation among others. He is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at
Stanford University.
Richard Lee Rhodes was born in
Kansas City, Kansas in 1937. Following his mother's suicide on July 25, 1938, Rhodes, along with his older (by a year and a half) brother Stanley, was raised by his father, a railroad boilermaker with a third-grade education. When Rhodes was ten their father remarried a woman who starved, exploited, and abused the children. Stan, age 13, standing 5' 4" and weighing an emaciated 98 pounds, saved both boys by walking into a police station and reporting to the authorities the conditions under which they lived. (For these details and others see Rhodes' memoir
A Hole in the World.) The boys were sent to the
Andrew Drumm Institute, an institution for boys founded in
1928 in
Independence,
Missouri. The admission of the brothers was something of an anomaly as the institution was designed for orphans and wayward youth and they fit neither category. (The Drumm Institute is still in operation today, but now accepts both boys and girls. Rhodes, as an adult, became a Director.)[
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Richard and Stanley lived at Drumm for the remainder of their youth and both graduated high school. Rhodes was admitted to
Yale University and received the
Victor Wilson Scholarship which awarded him full tuition, room, board and other expenses for four years. Rhodes graduated with honors in
1959. He went on to publish 20 books and numerous articles for national magazines. He received the
Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction, a
National Book Award, and the
National Book Critics Circle Award for
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, published in
1986. He currently resides in
California with his wife, Dr. Ginger Rhodes.
Rhodes found the most success with his
1986 book,
The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a narrative of the history of the people and events during
World War II from the discoveries leading to the science of
nuclear fission in the 1930s, through the
Manhattan Project and the
atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among its many honors, the 900-page book won the
Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (in 1988), a
National Book Award, and a
National Book Critics Circle Award, and has sold many hundreds of thousands of copies in
English alone, as well as having been translated into a dozen or so other languages. Praised by both historians and former
Los Alamos weapon scientists alike, the book is considered a general authority on early
nuclear weapons history, as well as the development of modern physics in general, during the first half of the twentieth century. Nobel Laureate
Isidor Rabi, one of the prime participants in the dawn of the atomic age, said about the book, "An epic worth of Milton. Nowhere else have I seen the whole story put down with such elegance and gusto and in such revealing detail and simple language which carries the reader through wonderful and profound scientific discoveries and their application."
In
1992, Rhodes followed it up by compiling, editing, and writing the introduction to an annotated version of
The Los Alamos Primer, by Manhattan Project scientist
Robert Serber. The
Primer was a set of lectures given to new arrivals at the secret Los Alamos laboratory during wartime in order to get them up to speed about the prominent questions needing to be solved in bomb design, and had been largely declassified in 1965, but was not widely available.
Rhodes published a sequel to
The Making of the Atomic Bomb in
1995,
Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb, which told the story of the atomic
espionage during World War II (
Klaus Fuchs,
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, among others), the debates over whether the hydrogen bomb ought to be produced (see
History of nuclear weapons), and the eventual creation of the bomb and its consequences for the arms race.
John James Audubon, published in 2004, is a biography of the french-born American artist,
John James Audubon (1785-1851). Audubon is known for his watercolor illustrations of birds and wildlife, including
The Birds of America, a multivolume work published through subscriptions in the mid 1800s, first in England and then in the United States.
Rhodes' 1997 book
Deadly feasts deals with the life of
Daniel Carleton Gajdusek,
prions, and
mad cow disease.
*
(expected April 2006)
