MixedScienceMotivated by the climate change crisis, Richard Rhodes’s Energy: A Human History sets out on a historical tour of how humans have manipulated nature to lift, transport, heat, and illuminate things over the past four centuries. Rhodes brings the same storytelling finesse to this work that he brought to his 1986 Pulitzer Prize–winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb, as well as the conviction that nuclear power is the solution for moving humankind away from fossil fuels ... But his cavalier treatment of nuclear disasters and the radioactive waste problem fails to commend the atom as a green energy. Nevertheless, Rhodes’s hope that a critical look at past energy technologies will benefit those of the future is heartening. May this come to pass.
