100 books like Truman

Published nineteen years before American Prometheus, this book also won a Pulitzer Prize.

A self-taught scientific writer, Rhodes is able to weave vivid character portrayals into the narrative of the science behind the bomb, turning a complex story into fascinating reading. Over several lunches with Patricia, Rhodes described Oppenheimer as someone who could antagonize and amuse at the same time.

She found the writer’s psychological  insights especially revealing. This is a book to be read and re-read.

Back when I was an atheist undergraduate college student, this book, among others, saved my life.

I’d walked away from everything religious and hence lacked all moral grounding. Although I was ambitious, I had no clue what I wanted to do with my life. Only what I didn’t want to do with my life.

My animosity against all things religious was huge, but the stoic philosophy of discipline and self-control kept me from throwing my life away.

This book had me laughing from the first paragraph.

I had no plan to write novels then. I just wanted to write in a beautiful leather journal a good friend gave me to record my thoughts on my trip to Greece. It was a trip I’d planned with others, one in particular. But when he decided to leave, I went anyway. Alone.

A friend of mine knew the trip would be emotionally and technically difficult. Travelling alone in a non-English-speaking country can be dicey. She hoped that this book would provide relief from the debris of my personal life. And it did.

As I read this book, I felt like the author was looking into my soul. I loved the short, punchy observations and challenges to anyone seeking to share their creativity. The Resistance is a force universal to everyone who is trying to share a little piece of themselves, and I love the way that it is broken down in this book.

I realized that when I could see what was holding me back from expressing myself, I was able to find strategies to mitigate that fear. This book was instrumental in my ability to express myself as an author and speaker. 

I really enjoyed Christopher Nolan’s Academy Award-winning Oppenheimer movie, and this book is the perfect book to read after watching it. Hiroshima was the first widespread account of what Oppenheimer’s creation – the atomic bomb – did to the people of Hiroshima.

Written in the immediate aftermath of the nuclear bombing, Hiroshima tells the story of six men and women who survived amidst the destruction that killed over 100,000 other people. By focusing on these six survivors, Hersey makes the almost unimaginable scale of destruction achingly real and relatable. At one point, he describes "the wounded as silent as the dead around them," and this line sends shivers down my spine. 

Few writers can conduct such detailed investigative reporting and tell the story in such a human way that still resonates today, nearly 80 years after it was first published. 

Zak is an award-winning reporter for the Washington Post, where his gift for prose is on regular display.

When he turned his skillful journalist’s eye toward nuclear weaponry and present-day anti-nuclear activism, the result was a book that takes readers through the night and aftermath of a break-in at one of the most secure facilities in the country and a look at the moments and forces in history that shaped the people involved.

Published in 1965 and written by then Washington and foreign correspondent of Time Magazine Lamont, this book remains for me an exceptionally compelling narrative history.

The lens here is focused tightly on the events leading up to the first-ever test of an atomic bomb, which was codenamed “Trinity.” Obsessively researched, yes, but it’s Lamont’s writing that makes readers feel as though they are there, in the vastness of the desert, witnessing a happening that changed the world forever.

I love the stories. Author Robert Greene’s stories about Semmelweis and William Harvey show the nasty consequences of ‘not suffering fools gladly.’

His notion of 10,000 hours to achieve mastery cuts through the challenges I face with each new book: I hate the feeling of not knowing what I’m doing, dislike feeling out of control, and get antsy when something I’m working on doesn’t fall into place easily.

Suck it up because that’s precisely how I feel each time I think about my new book on the early life of King David.

This is a collection of Oppenheimer’s essays and speeches, a good thing to read to get a sense of the man himself, how he thinks, how he handles language.

How he struggles to suggest how civilization might begin to cope with the reality that new weapons now exist capable of annihilating civilization... “unless we show,” he says, ”urged by our own example and conviction, that we regard nuclear armament as a transitory, dangerous and degrading phase of the world’s history.”

He said that forty years ago, and counting.

Mexican history is full of abrupt reversals. The life of Santa Anna, many times president and dictator of Mexico, is a wonderful example. Infamous in the United States for the Battle of the Alamo, where he gave no quarter to the defenders fighting for Texan independence, the general was vilified in Mexico for the far more heinous crime of losing Texas, once Mexican territory.

Two years later, his political career over, he lost his leg repelling French marines who were trying to seize the port of Veracruz. Santa Anna was now the saviour of Mexico, returning to power in 1841 and, for good measure, having his amputated leg buried with full military honours. Soon, however, he was forced to limp from office while an angry mob exhumed the leg, dragging it round Mexico City to humiliate their former leader. Yet this was far from the last time he held power.… show more.