Richard Rhodes

Richard Lee Rhodes (b. July 4, 1937) is an American journalist, historian, and author of both fiction and non-fiction (which he prefers to call "verity"), including the Pulitzer Prize-winning "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" (1986), and most recently, "Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race" (2007). He has been awarded grants from the Ford Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation among others. He is an affiliate of the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University. He also frequently gives lectures and talks on a broad range of subjects to various audiences, including testifying before the U.S. Senate on nuclear energy.

Biography

Richard Rhodes was born in Kansas City, Kansas, in 1937. Following his mother's suicide on July 25, 1938, Rhodes, along with his older (by a year and a half) brother Stanley, was raised in and around Kansas City, Missouri, by his father, a railroad boilermaker with a third-grade education. When Rhodes was ten their father remarried a woman who starved, exploited, and abused the children. Stan, age 13, standing 5’ 4” and weighing an emaciated 98 pounds, saved both boys by walking into a police station and reporting to the authorities the conditions under which they lived. (For these details and others see Rhodes’ memoir "A Hole in the World.") The boys were sent to the Andrew Drumm Institute, an institution for boys founded in 1928 in Independence, Missouri. The admission of the brothers was something of an anomaly as the institution was designed for orphaned or indigent boys and they fit neither category. (The Drumm Institute is still in operation today, and now accepts both boys and girls. Rhodes became a member of the board of trustees in 1991.) [http://www.drummfarm.org/index.htm]

Richard and Stanley lived at Drumm for the remainder of their adolescence. Both graduated from high school. Rhodes was admitted to Yale University and received the Victor Wilson Scholarship, which awarded him full tuition, room, board, and other expenses for four years. Rhodes graduated with honors in 1959. He went on to publish 21 books and numerous articles for national magazines; his best-known work, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", was published in 1986 and earned Rhodes the Pulitzer Prize and numerous other awards. Many of his personal documents and research materials are part of the Kansas Collection at the Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas.

He is the father of two children, is a grandfather, and currently resides in California with his wife, Dr. Ginger Rhodes. His website [http://www.RichardRhodes.com] offers a schedule of his public appearances.

Nuclear history

Rhodes came to national prominence with his 1986 book, "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", a narrative of the history of the people and events during World War II from the discoveries leading to the science of nuclear fission in the 1930s, through the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Among its many honors, the 900-page book won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction (in 1988), a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award, and has sold many hundreds of thousands of copies in English alone, as well as having been translated into a dozen or so other languages. Praised by both historians and former Los Alamos weapon scientists alike, the book is considered a general authority on early nuclear weapons history, as well as the development of modern physics in general, during the first half of the twentieth century. Nobel Laureate Isidor Rabi, one of the prime participants in the dawn of the atomic age, said about the book, "An epic worthy of Milton. Nowhere else have I seen the whole story put down with such elegance and gusto and in such revealing detail and simple language which carries the reader through wonderful and profound scientific discoveries and their application."

In 1992, Rhodes followed it up by compiling, editing, and writing the introduction to an annotated version of "The Los Alamos Primer", by Manhattan Project scientist Robert Serber. The "Primer" was a set of lectures given to new arrivals at the secret Los Alamos laboratory during wartime in order to get them up to speed about the prominent questions needing to be solved in bomb design, and had been largely declassified in 1965, but was not widely available.

In 1993, Rhodes published "Nuclear Renewal: Commonsense about Energy" detailing the history of the nuclear power industry in the United States, and future promises of nuclear power.

Rhodes published a sequel to "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" in 1995, "Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb", which told the story of the atomic espionage during World War II (Klaus Fuchs, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, among others), the debates over whether the hydrogen bomb ought to be produced (see History of nuclear weapons), and the eventual creation of the bomb and its consequences for the arms race.

Most recently in 2007, Rhodes published "Arsenals of Folly: The making of the nuclear arms race", a chronicle of the arms buildups during the Cold War, especially focusing on Mikhail Gorbachev and the Reagan administration. Rhodes is planning to publish a fourth and final book in his series of nuclear history, "The Twilight of the Bombs", documenting among other topics the post Cold War nuclear history of the world, nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism. [http://www.RichardRhodes.com]

Other prominent works

"John James Audubon", published in 2004, is a biography of the French-born American artist, John James Audubon (1785-1851). Audubon is known for his life-sized watercolor illustrations of birds and wildlife, including "Birds of America", a multivolume work published through subscriptions in the mid 1800s, first in England and then in the United States. Rhodes also edited a collection of Audubon's letters and writings published by Everyman's Library (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)--"The Audubon Reader".

Rhodes' 1997 book "Deadly Feasts" is a work of verity concerning transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, prions, and the career of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek. It reviews the history of TSE epidemics, beginning with the infection of large numbers of the Fore people of the New Guinea Eastern Highlands during a period when they consumed their dead in mortuary feasts, and explores the link between new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (nvCJD) in humans and the consumption of beef contaminated with bovine spongiform encephalopathy, commonly referred to as mad cow disease.

Though less well known as a writer of fiction, Rhodes is also the author of four novels. Three of the four are currently out of print, but "The Ungodly: A Novel of the Donner Party," his first, was reissued in a new edition in 2007 by Stanford University Press.

Bibliography

*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1970 | others = illus. Bill Greer | title = The Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American Middle West | publisher = Atheneum | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-333-12851-6
** cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1991 | title = The Inland Ground: An Evocation of the American Middle West. Revised Edition | publisher = University Press of Kansas | location = Lawrence, KS | id = ISBN 0-7006-0499-5
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1973 | title = The Ungodly: A Novel of the Donner Party | publisher = Charterhouse | location = New York
**cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 2007 | title = The Ungodly: A Novel of the Donner Party | publisher = Stanford University Press | location = Palo Alto, CA | id = ISBN 0-804-75641-4
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1974 | title = The Ozarks | publisher = Time-Life | location = New York | id = ASIN B000723IJG
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1978 | title = Holy Secrets | publisher = Doubleday | location = Garden City, N.Y. | id = ISBN 0-385-02565-3
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1979 | title = Looking for America: A Writer's Odyssey | publisher = Doubleday | location = Garden City, N.Y. | id = ISBN 0-385-14473-3
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1981 | title = Sons of Earth | publisher = Coward, McCann & Geoghegan | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-698-11055-2
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1986 | title = The Making of the Atomic Bomb | publisher = Simon & Schuster | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-671-44133-7
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1989 | title = Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer | publisher = Simon & Schuster | location = New York
**cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1997 | title = Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer | publisher = Bison Books (University of Nebraska Press) | location = Lincoln, NE | id = ISBN 0-803-28965-0
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1990 | title = A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood | publisher = Simon & Schuster | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-671-69066-3
** cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 2000 | title = A Hole in the World: An American Boyhood. Tenth Anniversary Edition with a new preface and epilogue | publisher = University Press of Kansas | location = Lawrence, KS | id = 0-7006-1038-3
*cite book | last = Serber | first = Robert | authorlink = Robert Serber | year = 1992 | others = ed. with introd. Richard Rhodes | title = The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How to Build an Atomic Bomb | publisher = University of California Press | location = Berkeley | id = ISBN 0-520-07576-5
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1992 | title = Making Love: An Erotic Odyssey | publisher = Simon & Schuster | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-671-78227-4
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1993 | title = Nuclear Renewal: Common Sense about Energy | publisher = Whittle Books | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-670-85207-4
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1995 | title = Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb | publisher = Simon & Schuster | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-684-80400-X
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1995 | title = How to Write: Advice and Reflections | publisher = W. Morrow | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-688-14095-5
*cite book | last = Fermi | first = Rachel | coauthors = and Esther Samra | year = 1995 | others = introd. Richard Rhodes | title = Picturing the Bomb: Photographs from the Secret World of the Manhattan Project | publisher = H.N. Abrams | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-8109-3735-2
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Ginger | coauthors = and Richard Rhodes | year = 1996 | title = Trying to Get Some Dignity: Stories of Triumph over Childhood Abuse | publisher = W. Morrow | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-688-14096-3
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1997 | title = Deadly Feasts: Tracking the Secrets of a Terrifying New Plague | publisher = Simon & Schuster | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-684-82360-8
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard (ed.) | year = 1999 | title = Visions of Technology: A Century of Vital Debate about Machines, Systems, and the Human World | publisher = Simon & Schuster | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-684-83903-2
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 1999 | title = Why They Kill: The Discoveries of a Maverick Criminologist | publisher = Alfred A. Knopf | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-375-40249-7
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 2002 | title = Masters of Death: The SS-Einsatzgruppen and the Invention of the Holocaust | publisher = Alfred A. Knopf | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-375-40900-9
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 2004 | title = John James Audubon: The Making of an American | publisher = Alfred A. Knopf | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-375-41412-6
*cite book | last = Audubon | first = John James | authorlink = John James Audubon | coauthors = (ed. Richard Rhodes) | year = 2006 | title = The Audubon Reader | publisher = Alfred A. Knopf | location = New York | id = ISBN 1-4000-4369-7
*cite book | last = Rhodes | first = Richard | year = 2007 | title = Arsenals of Folly: The Making of the Nuclear Arms Race | publisher = Alfred A. Knopf | location = New York | id = ISBN 0-375-41413-4

External links

* [http://www.booknotes.org/Transcript/?ProgramID=1450 "Booknotes" interview with Rhodes on "Farm: A Year in the Life of an American Farmer", December 24, 1989.]

Persondata
NAME=Rhodes, Richard Lee
ALTERNATIVE NAMES=
SHORT DESCRIPTION=Journalist and author
DATE OF BIRTH=July 4, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH=Kansas City, Kansas
DATE OF DEATH=
PLACE OF DEATH=