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.
Handsome ... His cast is various, their inclusion in a collection like this helped very much by their learning and erudition. Graff’s success is in marshaling, corralling. But this is an oral history, and oral history is a lush place to hide ... Graff crouches behind his sources ... There is a perversity in praising the scientific-industrial achievement of the project without a fuller reckoning with the ensuing shadowed age it helped to create ... Graff does well to paint the voyages made by several of the Manhattan Project’s leading minds to the refuge of America ... In its lapses, Graff’s book, perhaps unconsciously, helps this dangerous temptation persist — along with the myth that the bombings were inevitable or unavoidable.
