This remarkable book has a sweep and depth that its title does not even hint at. At first glance, it is just a biography of Hans Bethe that stops before the birth of the Manhattan Project, in which Bethe was to play a central role. But it is far more than that. Inter alia, it describes the cultural and political environment in which physics developed in Germany in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the role played by German Jews in that development; the exodus of Jewish scientists from Nazi Germany to the United States; academic life and scientific research in Germany, England, and the United States before the second world war; and, of course, the revolutionary growth of knowledge about the atom and its nucleus, and how that knowledge unlocked deep mysteries about how brightly and for how long stars shine.
Hans Bethe is the central character...
