Book Review: Bomb: The Race to Build and Steal the World's Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin

Once again, I found myself deeply engulfed in this non-fiction book which one a Newbery Honor, The Robert F Sibert Medal, YALSA-ALA Winner of the Excellence in Young Adult Nonfiction, and a National Book Award Finalist. It is easy to understand why after reading it.

Steve Sheinkin's Bomb: The Race to Build and Steal the World's Most Dangerous Weapon was fascinating to me, and I learned so much while reading it.

First, Albert Einstein did not help create the Atom Bomb. What Einstein did was send a letter to President Franklin D Roosevelt explaining about a scientific discovery in Germany which has the possibility of creating devastating weapons. The discovery was made by the German chemist, Otto Haun, who discovered the splitting of uranium atoms and the chain-reaction called fission.

Second, President Roosevelt took the information seriously and created a department specifically for beating Germany in the race to build the Atomic Bomb. Robert Oppenheimer, a physicist and professor at Berkley, was given the job. He recruited a top team of scientist from all over the world to see the project through. Their job was to build a bomb before Hitler.

Third, and what I loved most about the book was the espionage angle between the US and the USSR, which I never knew existed during World War II. I grew up in the 80’s cold war era and the arms race to be the country with the most nuclear weapons. My generation grew up with the constant fear and threat of war.

I never knew that a nineteen-year-old American genius and fellow scientist named Ted Hall was be one of the spies that handed over the instructions on how to build a nuclear weapon to the Russians. The book details his reasons for his decisions as a Communist sympathizer. Hall figured that no one nation should have a monopoly on war technology, and since Russia was doing most of the fighting against Germany, it was only fair that the information is shared with them.

After reading this book it was easy for me to see the marketing potential to children in both the history arena and the real spy cat-and-mouse game between the US and Russia.