Great Read.. recommended.

The Pope of Physics, is an outstanding cradle to grave full life biography of Enrico Fermi. This is a wonderfully easy read which tries to take the reader on Enrico’s life journey of a child of a poor family who went on to become in 1938 The Nobel Prize Winner for physics.

A genius among geniuses Fermi bridged the gap between between experimental and theoretical physicists by being both. He brought Italy for a time back among leaders of the world wide physics community.

Fermi escaped Italy with his wife Laura who was racially Jewish before it fully embraced the Anti Semitic lead of Nazi Germany and emigrated to the United States where along with Ernest Rutherford, I.I. Rabi, Edward Teller, Luis Alvarez and Robert Oppenheimer to name just a few he helped in the successful completion of the Manhattan Project.

From the self sustaining pile at the University of Chicago, to the distant Oakridge Uranium Plant in Tennessee to Plutonium Reactor in Hanford Washington to end up at Los Alamos and present for the Trinity Test. Fermi was one of the intellectual fireballs that led the project to completion of the atomic bomb, but who sadly died young of stomach cancer November 28th, 1954.

A fantastic quick 5 star read on a familiar name to many of the persons who I knew little about. ( )

I've never studied physics and the only thing I knew of Fermi was that his name gets tossed around quite a bit on the Big Bang Theory, usually in reference to the Fermi lab. This biography fills in the knowledge gap in an understandable way for those not of a scientific bent. Integral to the development of the atomic age, this reveals Fermi as a man on a personal level during one of the most tumultuous times in history. ( )

While not the most riveting biography I've ever read, this book was absolutely educational and informative. Enrico Fermi may be one of the most underrated physicists in modern history. It always strikes me as odd that Einstein is a household name and Fermi is mostly unknown, but I'd venture that he has had a more direct impact on our lives.

Regardless, I found the most interesting parts of the book to be about Fermi's desire to lead an entirely apolitical life, separating science from its possible societal impacts. I am not somebody who believes that science exists in a vacuum, so I always find it a bit shocking to think that scientists wanted to build the most destructive weapons in human history because they could, with no regard for future impacts on a societal and political level.

Needless to say, Fermi's impacts go beyond his contributions to fission and leading the first controlled nuclear reaction. And reading about these discoveries in the context of the great political upheavals going on in Italy and even in the US at the time was quite educational. ( )

This is an excellent biography of the Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi. I received a copy of this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program in exchange for an honest review.

This book is an enjoyable read (at times downright suspenseful), and appeals to us at many levels. It tells of an exciting time in physics, and the science is explained in a way that the general reader can understand and feel the excitement of discovery. It’s also the story of the development of the atomic bomb, the war that was its context, and the moral questions that arose at the time, and afterwards. It’s also a story of Fermi the man. The co-authors have personal connections that let them create a story rich in anecdote and detail. I wanted to read every word.

The story line I enjoyed the most was a kind of educational miracle. Over a hundred years ago, universal education did not exist in Italy; Fermi’s family had to advocate for him even being taught reading and mathematics. It was a bit of a miracle that he learned physics at all, by picking up an old book in the Campo dei’ Fiori. Then, Italian science had fallen to a low ebb, and the University of Rome had to educate a class of students that knew more than their professor. I smiled a lot as I pictured the group of four energetic and irreverent young men who successfully carried out research at the university, mostly on their own. Fermi took a role in his class there, and in his subsequent work teams at the University of Chicago and at Los Alamos, where he made sure knowledge was shared. His greatest gifts may have been as a teacher at the end of his life. He not only made great discoveries, but built up the scientific community.

Finally this book, dedicated “To immigrants, then and now,” is an immigration story. Enrico Fermi was technically an enemy alien, but he successfully immigrated to the United States, and as it turned out, we needed him very much. We’re being encouraged just now to worry about who we let in to the country. This book invites us to think more clearly about who we might be shutting out.