Book picks similar to
A Nuclear Family Vacation: Travels in the World of Atomic Weaponry by Nathan Hodge
non-fiction
nuclear
nonfiction
travel
Countdown 1945: The Extraordinary Story of the 116 Days that Changed the World
Chris Wallace - 2020
Roosevelt’s death. Countdown 1945 tells the gripping true story of the turbulent days, weeks, and months to follow, leading up to August 6, 1945, when new President Harry Truman gives the order to unleash the world’s first atomic bomb. Featuring some of history’s most remarkable leaders, page-turning action, and vivid details, Countdown 1945 is a thrilling narrative of the covert meetings and pivotal developments that took place in the United States and around the world during the volatile spring and summer of 1945.Countdown 1945 takes readers inside the minds of the iconic and elusive figures who join the quest for the bomb, each for different reasons: the legendary Albert Einstein, who eventually calls his vocal support for the atomic bomb “the one great mistake in my life”; lead researcher Robert “Oppie” Oppenheimer and the Soviet spies who secretly infiltrate his team; the fiercely competitive pilots of the plane selected to drop the bomb; and many more. Perhaps most of all, Countdown 1945 is the story of an untested new president confronting a decision that he knows will change the world forever. Truman’s journey during these 116 days is a story of high drama: from the shock of learning of the bomb’s existence, to the conflicting advice he receives from generals like Eisenhower and George Marshall, to wrestling with the devastating carnage that will result if he gives the order to use America’s first weapon of mass destruction.But Countdown 1945 is more than a book about the atomic bomb. It’s also an unforgettable account of the lives of ordinary American and Japanese civilians in wartime—from “Calutron Girls” like Ruth Sisson in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to ten-year-old Hiroshima resident Hideko Tamura, who survives the blast at ground zero but loses her mother, and later immigrates to the United States, where she lives to this day—as well as American soldiers fighting in the Pacific, waiting in fear for the order to launch a possible invasion of Japan. Told with vigor, intelligence, and humanity, Countdown 1945 is the definitive account of one of the most consequential moments in history.
1969: The Year Everything Changed
Rob Kirkpatrick - 2009
Compelling, timely, and a blast to read, 1969 chronicles the year in culture and society, sports, music, film, politics, and technology. This rich, comprehensive history is perfect for those who survived 1969 or for those who simply want to feel as though they did.
A Short History of Medicine
Steve Parker - 2019
Immerse yourself in the history of medicine - a colourful story of skill, serendipity, trial and error, moments of genius, and dogged determination.From traditional chinese medicine to today's sophisticated gene therapies and robotic surgery, A Short History of Medicine combines riveting storytelling and beautiful images, historical accounts and lucid explanations, to illuminate the story of medicine through time.Witness early, bloody, anaesthetic-free operations; see the first crude surgical instruments; trace the mapping of the circulatory system; follow the painstaking detective work that led to the decoding of the human genome; and understand the role that potions, cures, therapies, herbal medicines, and drugs have played in the human quest to tame and conquer disease, injury, and death.A Short History of Medicine is an engrossing illustrated history and tale of drama and discovery that celebrates the milestones of medical history across generations and cultures.
Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas
Edward Klein - 2014
An old-school reporter with incredible insider contacts, Klein reveals just how deep the rivalry between the Obamas and the Clintons runs, with details on closed-door meetings buttressed by hundreds of interviews. Blood Feud is a stunning exposé of the animosity, jealousy, and competition between America’s two most powerful political couples.
How Should Christians Vote?
Tony Evans - 2012
Asking the correct question is fundamental to knowing how to arrive at the correct answer.”Scriptural principles exist for both our personal and our political quandaries. We should be willing to dig deep to find them and move away from voting based on tradition or mere preferences.Dr. Tony Evans takes on foundational questions of a Christian approach to politics, like:What does the Bible say about the role and responsibilities of government?How can we be salt and light when our political systems fail us?Should we submit to candidates we didn’t vote for?What if we don’t know whom to choose, or worse—what if there is no good choice?Evans won’t pressure you to check this box or that, but he will equip you with solid biblical principles that will challenge you to vote with a “kingdom perspective”—informed, compassionate, and aware of Who is really in charge.
Dispatches
Michael Herr - 1977
Michael Herr’s unsparing, unorthodox retellings of the day-to-day events in Vietnam take on the force of poetry, rendering clarity from one of the most incomprehensible and nightmarish events of our time.Dispatches is among the most blistering and compassionate accounts of war in our literature.
Uranium Wars: The Scientific Rivalry that Created the Nuclear Age
Amir D. Aczel - 2009
Its nucleus is so heavy that it is highly unstable and radioactive. If broken apart, it unleashes the tremendous power within the atom—the most controversial type of energy ever discovered.Set against the darkening shadow of World War II, Amir D. Aczel's suspenseful account tells the story of the fierce competition among the day's top scientists to harness nuclear power. The intensely driven Marie Curie identified radioactivity. The University of Berlin team of Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner--he an upright, politically conservative German chemist and she a soft-spoken Austrian Jewish theoretical physicist--achieved the most spectacular discoveries in fission. Curie's daughter, Irène Joliot-Curie, raced against Meitner and Hahn to break the secret of the splitting of the atom. As the war raged, Niels Bohr, a founder of modern physics, had a dramatic meeting with Werner Heisenberg, the German physicist in charge of the Nazi project to beat the Allies to the bomb. And finally, in 1942, Enrico Fermi, a prodigy from Rome who had fled the war to the United States, unleashed the first nuclear chain reaction in a racquetball court at the University of Chicago.At a time when the world is again confronted with the perils of nuclear armament, Amir D. Aczel's absorbing story of a rivalry that changed the course of history is as thrilling and suspenseful as it is scientifically revelatory and newsworthy.
Basic Economics for Students and Non-Students Alike
Jerry Wyant - 2013
Graphs are not included, but both the graphs and the concepts behind them are explained; only basic math is included, and you can even skim over the math and still come away with an understanding of the concepts; statistics is not included at all.BASIC ECONOMICS FOR STUDENTS AND NON-STUDENTS ALIKE is an easy way to learn concepts relating to economics and the economy. It is a product of thousands of hours spent online, teaching basic concepts in economics to hundreds of students worldwide over the course of the past several years. From back and forth communications, I have discovered the explanations for the concepts that students find easiest to understand, as well as the areas that most often get misunderstood and under-emphasized.I have worked with students located throughout the United States and from many different countries, on six different continents; students from many different school systems with different points of emphasis; students with different levels of knowledge, different backgrounds, and different levels of interest in the subject. I have received numerous comments and testimonials regarding the teaching methods that I incorporate in BASIC ECONOMICS FOR STUDENTS AND NON-STUDENTS ALIKE.The subject matter included in BASIC ECONOMICS FOR STUDENTS AND NON-STUDENTS ALIKE comes from a compilation of many different textbooks at the introductory and intermediate levels. My goal was to include every subject in economics that normally will be found in an introductory level textbook of economics, microeconomics, or macroeconomics. Since different school systems, different classroom instructors, and different textbooks cover a slightly different combination of topics, BASIC ECONOMICS FOR STUDENTS AND NON-STUDENTS ALIKE is a little more comprehensive than most single introductory textbooks of economics. Some of the topics will be found in introductory classes in some schools, but in intermediate-level classes in other schools.
The Greatest Beer Run Ever: A Memoir of Friendship, Loyalty, and War
John "Chick" Donohue - 2017
You will laugh and cry, but you will not be sorry that you read this rollicking story.”—Malachy McCourtSoon to be a major motion picture written and directed by Peter Farrelly, who won two Academy Awards for Green Book—a wildly entertaining, feel-good memoir of an Irish-American New Yorker and former U.S. marine who embarked on a courageous, hare-brained scheme to deliver beer to his pals serving Vietnam in the late 1960s.One night in 1967, twenty-six-year-old John Donohue—known as Chick—was out with friends, drinking in a New York City bar. The friends gathered there had lost loved ones in Vietnam. Now, they watched as anti-war protesters turned on the troops themselves.One neighborhood patriot came up with an inspired—some would call it insane—idea. Someone should sneak into Vietnam, track down their buddies there, give them messages of support from back home, and share a few laughs over a can of beer.It would be the Greatest Beer Run Ever.But who’d be crazy enough to do it?One man was up for the challenge—a U. S. Marine Corps veteran turned merchant mariner who wasn’t about to desert his buddies on the front lines when they needed him.Chick volunteered.A day later, he was on a cargo ship headed to Vietnam, armed with Irish luck and a backpack full of alcohol. Landing in Qui Nho’n, Chick set off on an adventure that would change his life forever—an odyssey that took him through a series of hilarious escapades and harrowing close calls, including the Tet Offensive. But none of that mattered if he could bring some cheer to his pals and show them how much the folks back home appreciated them.This is the story of that epic beer run, told in Chick’s own words and those of the men he visited in Vietnam.
Miami Babylon: Crime, Wealth, and Power - A Dispatch from the Beach
Gerald Posner - 2009
Gerald Posner, author of the groundbreaking investigations "Case Closed" and "Why America Slept," has uncovered the hair-raising political-financial-criminal history of the Beach and reveals a tale that, in the words of one character, "makes "Scarface" look like a documentary." From its beginnings in the 1890s, the Beach has been a place made by visionaries and hustlers. During Prohibition, Al Capone had to muscle into its bootlegging and gambling businesses. After December 1941, when the Beach was the training ground for half a million army recruits, even the war couldn't stop the party. After a short postwar boom, the city's luck gave out. The big hotels went bankrupt, the crime rate rose, and the tourists moved on to Disney World and the Caribbean. Even after the Beach hosted both national political conventions in 1972, nobody would have imagined that this sandy backwater of run-down hotels and high crime would soon become one of the country's most important cultural centers.But in 1981, 125,000 Cubans arrived by the boatload. The empty streets of South Beach, lined with dilapidated Art Deco hotels, were about to be changed irrevocably by the culture of money that moved in behind cocaine and crime. Posner takes us inside the intertwined lives of politicians, financiers, nightclub owners, and real estate developers who have fed the Beach's unquenchable desire for wealth, flash, and hype: the German playboy who bought the entire tip of South Beach with $100 million of questionable money; the mayoral candidate who said, "If you can't take their money, drink their liquor, mess with their women, and then vote against them, you aren't cut out for politics"; the Staten Island thug who became king of the South Beach nightclubs only to have his empire unravel and saved himself by testifying against the mob; the campaign manager who calls himself the "Prince of Darkness" and got immunity from prosecution in a fraud case by cooperating with the FBI against his colleagues; and the former Washington, D.C., developer who played hardball with city hall and became the Beach's first black hotel owner.From the mid-level coke dealers and their suitcases of cash to the questionable billions that financed the ocean-view condo towers, the Beach has seen it all. Posner's singular report tells the real story of how this small urban beach community was transformed into a world-class headquarters for American culture within a generation. It is a story built by dreamers and schemers. And a steroid-injected cautionary tale.
Elemental: How the Periodic Table Can Now Explain (Nearly) Everything
Tim James - 2018
When the seventh row of the periodic table of elements was completed in June 2016 with the addition of four final elements—nihonium, moscovium, tennessine, and oganesson—we at last could identify all the ingredients necessary to construct our world.In Elemental, chemist and science educator Tim James provides an informative, entertaining, and quirkily illustrated guide to the table that shows clearly how this abstract and seemingly jumbled graphic is relevant to our day-to-day lives.James tells the story of the periodic table from its ancient Greek roots, when you could count the number of elements humans were aware of on one hand, to the modern alchemists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who have used nuclear chemistry and physics to generate new elements and complete the periodic table. In addition to this, he answers questions such as: What is the chemical symbol for a human? What would happen if all of the elements were mixed together? Which liquid can teleport through walls? Why is the medieval dream of transmuting lead into gold now a reality?Whether you're studying the periodic table for the first time or are simply interested in the fundamental building blocks of the universe—from the core of the sun to the networks in your brain—Elemental is the perfect guide.
The Mammoth Book of the Mafia
Nigel Cawthorne - 2009
It contains accounts by Richard 'The Iceman' Kuklinski, the contract killer who claimed to have murdered over 200 people in a career lasting 43 years.
Rocket Men: The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon
Craig Nelson - 2009
on July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 rocket launched in the presence of more than a million spectators who had gathered to witness a truly historic event. It carried Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Mike Collins to the last frontier of human imagination: the moon. Rocket Men is the thrilling story of the moon mission, and it restores the mystery and majesty to an event that may have become too familiar for most people to realize what a stunning achievement it represented in planning, technology, and execution. Through interviews, twenty-three thousand pages of NASA oral histories, and declassified CIA documents on the space race, Craig Nelson re-creates a vivid and detailed account of the Apollo 11 mission. From the quotidian to the scientific to the magical, readers are taken right into the cockpit with Aldrin and Armstrong and behind the scenes at Mission Control. Rocket Men is the story of a twentieth-century pilgrimage; a voyage into the unknown motivated by politics, faith, science, and wonder that changed the course of history.
The Phoenix Program: America's Use of Terror in Vietnam
Douglas Valentine - 1990
Between 1965 and 1972, more than eighty thousand noncombatants were “neutralized,” as men and women alike were subjected to extended imprisonment without trial, horrific torture, brutal rape, and in many cases execution, all under the watchful eyes of US government agencies.Based on extensive research and in-depth interviews with former participants and observers, Douglas Valentine’s startling exposé blows the lid off of what was possibly the bloodiest and most inhumane covert operation in the CIA’s history.The ebook edition includes “The Phoenix Has Landed,” a new introduction that addresses the “Phoenix-style network” that constitutes America’s internal security apparatus today. Residents on American soil are routinely targeted under the guise of protecting us from terrorism—which is why, more than ever, people need to understand what Phoenix is all about.