PositiveThe New RepublicThe technical details in these stories matter immensely, and Plokhy excels at breaking them down ... The book’s focus on discrete events has a downside, in that it elides the cumulative effects of three-quarters of a century of nuclear weapons production and testing ... Plokhy doesn’t provide an estimate of the global radiation exposure created by the orgy of nuclear tests conducted by the U.S., the Soviet Union, the U.K., and France between 1958 and 1963, when the three leading nuclear powers signed a Limited Test Ban Treaty that prohibited tests in the atmosphere, in outer space, and underwater; nor does he discuss the years that inhaling radioactive dust shaves off uranium miners’ lives. While he mentions, in passing, that no nuclear power has yet found a way to deal with its stockpiles of radioactive waste, it’s not a topic he dwells on. These, too, are nuclear disasters ... But while one can quibble with Plokhy’s definition of a nuclear disaster, the existence of these ongoing, slow-moving crises only underscores his central point: There is no safe way to harness the power of the atom.
Michael D Gordin
PositiveThe Los Angeles Review of Books...historians of science of my generation occasionally let themselves wonder about what might have been. One of these historians is Michael Gordin, whose fascinating new book, Einstein in Bohemia, demands we take seriously the idea that Albert Einstein himself was once just another physicist. A book about the most famous scientist in the world, it stubbornly, insistently, focuses on a 16-month stretch in which nothing particularly eventful happened ... For Gordin, the banality of Einstein’s time in Prague is the point. Einstein in Bohemia is as much a series of essays on historical method and memory as it is a biography that uses Einsteinian ideas about perspective and spacetime to riff about the relationship between past and present, space and place. It’s also very much a book about Prague. It works in movements, looking backward and forward from Einstein’s Bohemian interlude to explore issues of biography, physics, Czech and German nationalism, the philosophy of science, literature, Jewishness, and public monuments. It is best savored in chunks, to better indulge in moments of reflection ... a book focused as much on myth, memory, and what might have been as on how Einstein spent his 16 months in Prague. Einstein in Bohemia makes a persuasive case that spotlighting the most obscure moments of a scientist’s career can in fact illuminate larger truths — at least if that scientist is Einstein.