Sam Goudsmit and the Hunt for Hitler’s Atom Bomb

From March 1944 to October 1945, Dutch physicist Goudsmit headed Alsos, a secret American mission to discover just how close Hitler had gotten to having an atomic bomb. This heavy-going biography by science journalist van Calmthout (Einstein’s Light) elucidates why Goudsmit was chosen for the job—partly because of connections from his student days with German quantum theorist Werner Heisenberg—and what he and an accompanying military unit discovered as they pored over abandoned Nazi laboratories in Paris, Strasbourg, Berlin, and elsewhere behind the Allies’ advance. While packed with information, the story is encumbered by a jumbled structure, which jumps back and forth between different years and places, sometimes cramming them together in asides that read more like detours than insights into the main action. Moreover, van Calmthout fails to develop Goudsmit into a flesh-and-blood person. The author covers aspects of the scientist’s professional and personal life, including his emigration to the U.S., collaborations with other nuclear physicists, grief over his parents’ death in Auschwitz, and work as the editor of a physics journal, but in consistently cumbersome prose. Van Calmthout’s work will be largely restricted in appeal to hard-core nuclear history buffs. [em]Agent: Chrysothemis Armefti, 2 Seas Agency. (Nov.) [/em]