Review time! with ‘Bomb’

“Ashes and diamonds, foe and friend … we were all equal in the end”

Roaring Brook Press brings us Bomb, which is written by Steve Sheinkin and drawn by Nick Bertozzi. It is, perhaps not surprisingly, about building the atomic bomb. I know, it’s shocking!

When I ordered Bomb, I ordered it mainly because I like Nick Bertozzi’s art, and not necessarily for the subject matter. I also didn’t quite understand that this book was geared toward younger readers, which is Roaring Brook’s remit, but I’ve gotten books for younger readers before, and I will again! The question always is: Is the book good? The answer: Um …

You see, Sheinkin does a good job with the subject matter, but because it’s a straight history geared toward people who might not know much about the subject, he doesn’t do much else with it. On its own, the story is gripping – Sheinkin frames it with a story about Harry Gold, who’s accosted by FBI agents in 1950 who have evidence that he was supplying intelligence to the Soviets. As Harry cracks, his story comes out, and it eventually leads to New Mexico and the Manhattan Project. It’s a good device, and Sheinkin does well with it – Gold is a lowly chemist who knows a dude who gets him a job during the Depression, and in exchange, Gold just has to give over some of the processes used at the factory. Gold thinks little of it, because they’re not state secrets and his “friend” tells him they’re needed to help the Russian people. Gold gets more deeply involved, and during the war, he shared more things with his handlers, but he justified it by telling the FBI guys that they were allies with the Soviets, so what could it hurt? Meanwhile, Sheinkin is giving us a history of Oppenheimer, Bohr, and other physicists who are discovering things that, in hindsight, it might have been better left undiscovered, and how the military got involved (because of course they did). You know the story! Eventually, of course, the U.S. bombed Japan, the Russians got enough information about how they did it to restart their own moribund atomic project, and we entered the Cold War. Good times!

There’s not a lot of tension in the book, mainly because it’s not a thriller – there are some scenes set during the war when Norwegian commandos manage to cripple the Nazis’ atomic bomb project, but it’s not a big part of the book. Sheinkin does a good job explaining nuclear power, and he does well to give the main characters distinctive personalities – from Oppenheimer’s absent-mindedness to Leslie Groves’s gruff paternalism – and he infuses the entire narrative with a sense of sadness at what humans have unleashed. One thing that struck me was how easy it was to get secrets out of Los Alamos – Gold is the focal point of the book, but he wasn’t the only one, and heads probably should have rolled for the awful security measures around the base. There’s a weird sense of unreality to the proceedings, as if the U.S. government couldn’t believe that people building the most powerful weapon in human history would actually want to talk about it with others, and that ended up biting them in the ass a bit. Sheinkin does a nice job kind of downplaying that, because it makes the spying a bit more mundane, but it seems like it would have been a big deal to the government, yet New Mexico was a leaky bucket throughout the process.

As this book is geared toward younger readers, it’s also not surprising that Sheinkin doesn’t get more into anti-Semitism and anti-Communism, which were often linked. Gold’s Jewishness is never remarked upon, and his and others’ sympathy toward Communism – at a time when Stalin’s excesses were not well known to the world – is not touched upon, but the anti-Semitism in the States had to have something to do with these men trying to help the Russians, who at the time seemed more sympathetic toward Jews. Gold’s parents were from Ukraine, and that might have led him to feel a kinship with the Soviets, and, as he pointed out, the Americans and Russians were allies during the war. The convoluted attitude the American government had toward Jews and Communists in the aftermath of World War I probably had a great impact on these men, and it’s too complicated for Sheinkin to get into, but it’s a bit disappointing that he didn’t. It’s probably enough that he has Gold point out that he thought he was helping the Russian people, because Gold himself probably believed that. In the 1930s, it seems like very few foreigners, and certainly not someone like Gold, knew how monstrous Stalin really was.

I’ve always liked Bertozzi’s work, and his solid, straight-forward style works well for a book like this. He’s not fancy, but he is accomplished at drawing a large cast and making sure they all look different from each other. This is a cast of mostly white men who all dress similarly, so it’s even harder, but Bertozzi does his usual good job. He gets to do some action scenes, too, which is fun – his angular line work doesn’t fit as well with action as it might, but he choreographs the scenes very well, so it overcomes any weakness the figure work might exhibit – and he does a very good job with the technical aspects of building the bomb, which helps Sheinkin’s explanations about how it works. He uses a lot of chunky blacks to add gravitas to the scenes, making them more portentous as we head toward the point of no return, and he also does a nice job showing how ordinary the spies who smuggled the secrets out of the country were – they were just regular people, making them far harder to detect. Bertozzi is never going to dazzle anyone with his art, but he gets the job done, makes everything legible, and adds nice shades of emotion to the text. There’s nothing bad about that.

As I noted, I wish the book had gone a bit deeper into the motivations of the spies, but that’s not really the focus of the book. For what it wants to be, it’s good – Sheinkin wants to write the narrative of the Manhattan Project, and he does, and the spy stuff is just a good framing device. I don’t love the book, but again, it’s not targeted to me, so I’m not going to knock it. If you know nothing or very little about the atomic bomb, this is a very good way to learn about it. That’s not a bad thing, right?

Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ ☆ ☆ ☆