Critical Assembly: Poems of the Manhattan Project

"Let’s begin with Critical Assembly: Poems of the Manhattan Project by John Canaday, who is a poet. He also happens to be a Middlebury College graduate, but I don’t think I knew him when he was here. His book is fascinating. On the cover are photographs of a number of people who were involved in the Manhattan Project. Canaday’s book is divided into three parts. One part is poems about the pre-war situation, the lead-up to World War Two and the early nuclear physics experiments. Then the main part of the book is poems about the activities at Los Alamos, largely. The last part is about the lead-up to and consequences of Trinity, the first test of a nuclear weapon. What’s fascinating about these poems is every poem is named for a person, and the poem is written in that person’s voice. For example, J. Robert Oppenheimer appears three times. Einstein twice. Kitty Oppenheimer four times, Edward Teller five times. There are many others as well who appear two or three times in the book as the names of poems, and then they’re speaking. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter And it isn’t just the physicists. For example, there’s a wonderful poem that is in the voice of a stenographer who was called to the hotel room of a physicist to take a letter in dictation. She was sure she was being brought to this hotel room for unsavory reasons. She starts to take the dictation and she becomes increasingly convinced that the person is unhinged, because he’s talking about weapons of unimaginable power. And the person dictating the letter turns out to be Leo Szilard, a very famous nuclear physicist who first conceived of the idea of a nuclear fission chain reaction and later founded the Council for a Livable World , which is a disarmament advocacy organization in the United States. Szilard dictated the famous letter that was sent to Roosevelt over Einstein’s signature (Einstein didn’t really write it). So, this poem is about the dictation of the letter that got the Manhattan Project started. But the reaction of the stenographer to first being invited to the hotel room of this eccentric physicist and then writing down these very bizarre claims is quite remarkable. Throughout the book there are many, many poems and fascinating looks at the people and the events around the Manhattan Project. It’s poetry, but it is quite accurate. Reading the poems, I didn’t see any mistakes or anything. There is a long list of notes at the back, biographical notes about the people involved. By the way, this is not one of the books I’ve included but Canaday also wrote a book called The Nuclear Muse , which is a book about literature, physics and the first atomic bombs. It’s not poetry, it’s nonfiction. He’s quite an interesting writer. He’s a literary person, not a physicist, but he’s learned a lot about the physics. I think they could. There’s enough background in the book that they can learn some of that history. If they know some of the names and know some of the history, it might make for a greater appreciation of the book. But I think it’s just a fascinating, fascinating look at the Manhattan Project from a poet’s point of view. Richard Rhodes, The Making of the Atomic Bomb , is one of the most famous, but it’s quite dated. It was updated again in 2012, with some new material that had been released. I don’t have a particular book to recommend, but there have been a number of newer histories of the Manhattan Project compiled from the classified documents that were released in the early 2000s."