Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes delivers a remarkable story of science history: how a ravishing film star and an avant-garde composer invented spread-spectrum radio, the technology that made wireless phones, GPS systems, and many other devices possible.
 
Beginning at a Hollywood dinner table, Hedy's Folly tells a wild story of innovation that culminates in U.S. patent number 2,292,387 for a "secret communication system."

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Traces the development of the atomic bomb from Leo Szilard's concept through the drama of the race to build a workable device to the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima.

In this narrative history of the Einsatzgruppen--killer task forces deployed in Poland and the Soviet Union early in World War II by Himmler's SS--Richard Rhodes argues that Hitler made two separate decisions to murder the Jews of Europe. The first, in July 1941, condemned the eastern European Jews to slaughter by the Einsatzgruppen, who would execute 1.5 million victims between 1941 and 1943 by shooting them into killing pits, as at Babi Yar--crimes...

Richard Rhodes explores the discoveries of a maverick American criminologist, Dr. Lonnie Athens, which challenge conventional theories about violent behavior.

"Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author Richard Rhodes relates the remarkable story of the Spanish Civil War through the eyes of the reporters, writers, artists, doctors, and nurses who witnessed it. The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) inspired and haunted an extraordinary number of exceptional artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Martha Gellhorn, Ernest Hemingway, George Orwell, and John Dos Passos. The idealism of the cause--defending...

The story of the postwar superpower arms race, climaxing during the Reagan-Gorbachev decade. Drawing on a wealth of new documentation, Rhodes reveals how the Reagan administration's unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s led Soviet leader Andropov to conclude that Reagan must be preparing for a nuclear war. In 1983, when NATO staged a large series of field exercises, the Soviets came very close to launching a defensive first strike. Then Reagan...

A Pulitzer Prize-winning author presents this fully authorized--and timely-biography of the Harvard biologist and naturalist who has become a leading voice on the crucial importance to all life of biodiversity and has worked tirelessly to synthesize the fields of science and the humanities in a fruitful way.

This book presents the first photographic record of the Manhattan Project - the United States Government-sponsored effort to build an atomic device - and its publication coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the development of the atomic bomb. The compelling photographs from the Manhattan Project, by turns specific, abstract, dramatic, and surreal, offer a multifaceted look at history. Photographs of landscapes and of construction, of scientific...