M.G. Lord

last updated 8 January 2015

The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes (Simon & Schuster, $20). This is, quite simply, the most important science story of the last century, told by its most important science writer.

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Memories of a Catholic Girlhood by Mary McCarthy (Harvest, $13). In this memoir, novelist and critic McCarthy intersperses lively, fictive stories about her youth with more prosaic sections that detail what actually happened. McCarthy’s concern about the difference between fact and fiction may explain why she later took exception to Lillian Hellman’s autobiographical fabrications (resulting, when Hellman took exception to McCarthy’s exception, in a notorious lawsuit).

Hiroshima by John Hersey (Vintage, $7). Hersey, my college writing teacher, crafted this riveting, historically important account of six atomic-bomb survivors. His meticulous reporting makes the unthinkable comprehensible, a feat that earned admiration from most critics, though Mary McCarthy wasn’t one. Ever the contrarian, she argued that nuclear horror should remain beyond comprehension, not reduced to the “familiar order of catastrophes—fires, flood, earthquakes—which we have always had with us.”