An extremely fascinating read. Published over 60 years ago, it has the quality of feeling both like a historical document and a work written with time to contemplate the consequences of the atomic bomb. It is both riveting and sobering. The storytelling skill of the author kept me intellectually and emotionally involved from start to finish. I originally read it as an undergrad roughly thirty years ago. Back then, I was more awed by the lives of the young scientists but this time I was more struck by the hubris of scientists and government officials. The recent release of the film about Oppenheimer drew me back to this book. While I highly recommend the book, I would suggest both to myself and others to follow up this reading with some equally well written account published another twenty or more years later. ( )

The first book-length collective biography of atomic scientists - decades before any English example. ( )

Cleugh, James from the German

Reviewed in the August 1965 issue of the Socialist Standard:

http://socialiststandardmyspace.blogspot.com/2017/10/dimmer-than-thousand-fools-...

One of the New Scientist Top 25 Most Influential Popular Science Books (all of which I plan to read eventually), and mentioned in a recent read by Martin Gardner.

Fascinating. Part history, part biography, part political commentary, part social commentary, and part melodrama ("But Teller was not made to march with the rank and file.") unkind to Oppenheimer, but then the times and history were unkind...an unkindness that unfortunately passed to his children, or at least his daughter.

Jungk seemed at times in this English translation full of adoration for these scientists and at other times condemning. I wonder if the German (Jungk was Austrian) original was as lyrical, poetic, or dramatic as the translation. Though I took German in high school, I remember near none and have no intention of reading this in its original language, so must be content with this. Again, fascinating...and as a young man, I might have read it with less of a skeptical eye. Still, an enjoyable read. ( )