Made the story more human, especially when the weapon’s essential inhumanity threatens to overshadow everything else ... Focuses on the physical making of the bomb itself ... Graff’s approach is disconcerting at first. His subtitle describes the book as an oral history; in fact, each chapter is a compilation of snippets from interviews, memoirs and the personal testimony of figures ... In the end, the approach works. Each chapter provides a composite picture of important events based on multiple reactions and observations.
